Worst Case

Chapter 65

WAKING ABRUPTLY IN the dark, Francis Mooney immediately regretted the third Scotch he’d ordered the night before. Alcohol always disrupted his sleep. He was trying to fall back when the 1010 WINS xylophone started up from his radio alarm.

“Good morning,” the anchor said. “It’s five-thirty. Alternate side of the street parking is suspended today for Ash Wednesday.”

Despair surged like vomit into the back of Francis’s throat at the mention of the day.

It was here, he thought as he began to whimper inconsolably. No! It’s too soon. I can’t face this. How can I face doing this?

Tears poured down his cheeks. It took him a full ten minutes of breathing slowly to control himself enough to sit up. He squeezed his fists, digging his fingernails into his palms as hard as he could. The pain was exquisite, but it did the trick. He wiped his eyes, shut off the radio, and swung his feet out of bed.

He made coffee and carried it through the immaculate rooms of his 25th Street Chelsea town house. Up a circular staircase on the second floor was his favorite place, his rooftop lounge.

Outside, the cold air was pleasant as he wiggled his bare toes on the tar paper. He remembered playing tag on the roof of his Inwood tenement when he was a child. Was that why he liked this rooftop lounge so much?

From the almost-empty street below, he heard a speeding cab’s tire slap off a road plate. He smiled, looking north at the green McGraw-Hill Building, which loomed like some landlocked Art Deco cruise ship. His smile departed as he turned toward the hint of dawn on the dark eastern horizon behind the Empire State Building.

The day was coming. It would not be stopped. Another tear rolled down his cheek. He wiped it away. He finally steeled himself with a breath and tipped his mug at the coming dawn as if in a toast.

Gray light was spilling down 25th Street as he locked his front door half an hour later. He always dressed well, but this morning of all mornings, he’d pulled out all the stops. He slid a hand down the sleek lapel of his best suit, a light gray chalk-stripe Henry Poole he’d splurged on when he was in London on business six years before. The thirty-two-hundred-dollar black John Lobb calfskin brogues on his feet complemented it perfectly. The only thing that didn’t really go was the large case he carried. It was black and boxy with stainless-steel hasps.

He popped the cuffs of his Italian milled-poplin Turn-bull & Asser shirt as he carefully lifted the heavy case and brought it with him out into the street to hail a taxi.

The church that the cab let him out in front of ten minutes later was Most Holy Redeemer on 3rd Street in the East Village. He’d chosen it as his parish because it was the city’s most tolerant, catering to gays and the HIV-positive.

At the votive offering inside the tiny chapel, he lit some candles and said a prayer for the teenagers he had killed. Like martyrs’, their souls would ascend directly to heaven, he knew. Their necessary sacrifice was most certainly acknowledged by God. Francis had faith in that. How could he have done this without faith?

He raised his head as the organ began. The seven-o’clock mass was about to start. He quickly lit a last candle.

“So that my faith will not waver this day, my Lord,” he whispered in the scented darkness.

He sat in the last pew. When the time came, he lined up behind the dozen early churchgoers and got his ashes. They were made from palms like the ones that had welcomed the Lord on the last week of His life. Francis found comfort in that fact. The scratch of the priest’s thumb on his forehead almost made him cry out. Then the sacred words of Latin were in his ears.

“Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.”

Know that you are dust and to dust you shall return.

“I am dust,” Francis said to himself as he turned and came back down the aisle. He felt amazing, unblemished, filled with the light of the Lord’s grace. He scooped up the heavy valise he had left by the kneeler. His step was light as he came out of the church into the new morning.

Chapter 66

OUT ON THE sidewalk the next morning, despite my sleep deprivation, I found myself smiling as I walked my kids to church. Cutting an extra-wide swath through the bustling Manhattan foot traffic, Chrissy and Shawna entertained one and all by singing every Nationwide and free-credit-report-dot-com commercial they knew by heart.

Wearing their plaid school uniforms and walking in two sort of straight lines, my ten boys and girls looked like they’d stepped off the first page of Madeline. Maybe I wasn’t as tough as Miss Clavel, but I did carry a Glock.

My gang’s warmth and lack of self-consciousness as we walked were contagious enough that I almost forgot the horror of my latest case. That is, until we ran into the solemn people spilling out of the early mass at Holy Name.

My eyes locked on the ashes on their foreheads. My stomach churned as images of the two dead teens shot through my mind. I could almost see the blood patterns from their wounds on the church steps.

I let out an angry breath. It made me sick that something so holy had taken on such a twisted symbolism. Ashes were supposed to symbolize sacrifice and humbleness at Christ’s suffering. They weren’t supposed to be a detail in an autopsy report that I couldn’t get out of my head.

The churchgoers themselves seemed a little self-conscious. Last night Seamus had told me that the archdiocese had done a little hand-wringing over whether to distribute ashes today, because of the high-profile case. I was glad wiser heads had prevailed down at St. Pat’s. Having one person hold such sway over all of New York City ’s Catholics would have been horrendous.

As we entered the church, Eddie and Ricky headed toward the front to put on their altar boy attire. Julia led the rest of the kids into the church’s rear pew as I went over to the votives.

I dropped a five into the offering box and lit candles. Kneeling down before their ruby glow, I closed my eyes and said prayers for the dead and most especially for their families. I knew all too well how completely devastating death could be in a tight-knit family. I could only guess at a parent’s depth of despair that the loss of an only child would bring.

As I was crossing myself, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Seamus.

“Good man. Just the lad I was looking for,” he whispered. “I need a volunteer. Will you do the first reading or bring up the gifts? Your choice.”

“Bring up the gifts,” I said.

“Actually, you’ll have to do both. I lied about that choice thing. Let’s get this show on the road.”

The mass seemed more solemn and sadder than usual. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the killer out of my thoughts even when Seamus whispered the High Latin phrase used on this solemn holy day.

“Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris,” he said as he administered the ashes.

From dust we are born and to dust we shall return, I thought. It was the same thing written on the blackboard next to the first poor young man’s corpse.

Please, God, help me to stop the sick individual who is responsible for all this death, I prayed as I walked back to my pew with the cross on my forehead.

As I knelt down, I realized I was marked the same way the kids had been. My forehead seemed to burn. I could almost sense Jacob Dunning and Chelsea Skinner in the shadows around me. Behind my closed eyes, I could see the face of Dan Hastings, whose fate was still unknown.

Dear Lord, I prayed, I can’t let them down.

Chapter 67

FRANCIS X. MOONEY was passing the Flat Iron Building when he shook some Dexadrine tablets into his hand. As he made it across the street into Madison Square Park, he reconsidered, dropping them into a corner trash barrel. He didn’t need any speed today.

His blood felt like it was singing. In fact, everything that presented itself to his heightened senses seemed significant. The ornate architecture on the facades of the Beaux Arts buildings of lower Broadway, the scent of grease and sugar from the curbside doughnut carts, the filth-covered sidewalk beneath the soles of his shoes. None of it had ever been so vivid.

The case he carried was becoming heavier. He had to move it to his other hand every other block. Sweat from his exertion was actually making his shirt stick to his back. Still, no way would he call a taxi. His last walk, his last pilgrimage, had to be on foot.

He’d always loved the city. Walking its endlessly fascinating streets had been one of his life’s greatest and simplest pleasures. The French actually coined a word for urban strollers, flâneurs, people who derive pleasure from observing the urban scene completely objectively and aesthetically.

But that was the problem, he thought as he walked on. He had been objective for way too long.

At the corner of 25th and Fifth, he suddenly stopped. A woman was approaching the side alley of a run-down building, carrying a white garbage bag.

“Excuse me,” Francis called as he jogged over. “Miss! Miss! You there!”

She stopped.

“How dare you!” Francis said, pointing to a Diet Coke bottle clearly visible beneath the thin plastic garbage bag she was holding. “That’s recycling. You’re throwing out recycling!”

“What are you, the garbage police?” she said. She gave him the finger. “Get a life, you pathetic freak.”

Francis thought about shooting her. His Beretta, locked and loaded, waited at the top of the valise. Blow the smugness and the woman’s ugly face clean away, kick her into the stinking alley, where she belonged. Suddenly aware of the passing pedestrians, he got a grip instead. He wouldn’t let his emotions get the better of him. He had much bigger fish to fry.

But he just couldn’t help himself when he stopped for the second time, on 33rd, one block south of the Empire State Building. Putting down his case, he halted before the telephone company’s idling box truck on the corner.

“Excuse me!” he said to the oaf eating his breakfast behind the driver’s side window. He rapped sharply with his Columbia ring on the glass right beside the jerk’s face. “I said, excuse me!”

The phone guy threw open the door and leapt out onto the sidewalk. He had a shaved head and the shoulders of a defensive lineman.

“Fuck you knocking on my window for, dog?” he bellowed, spitting doughnut crumbs.

“Fuck you idling your truck for, dog?” Francis shot back. “You’re violating Section twenty-four-dash-one-sixty-three of the New York City Administrative Code: ‘No person shall cause or permit the engine of a motor vehicle, other than a legally authorized emergency motor vehicle, to idle for longer than three minutes while parking.’ You see that poison coming out of your tailpipe there? It includes chemicals like benzene, formaldehyde, and acetaldehyde, not to mention particulate matter that can lodge deep in your lungs. It kills people, heats up the environment, too. Now shut it-”

The gaping, wide-eyed phone company man let out a kind of snort as his huge hand suddenly reached out. He snatched Francis’s tie and swung him around in a full three-sixty before letting him go. Francis actually went off his feet as he slammed into a newspaper box on the corner. He skinned his chin and the palms of his hands as he went ass over tea kettle onto Fifth Avenue. Horns honked as Gotham Writers’ Workshop pamphlets fluttered past his face.

Turning, Francis got a good mouthful of particulate matter-laced exhaust as the fleeing phone truck left rubber. He coughed as he pulled himself back into a sitting position on the curb.

There were pebbles embedded in his bleeding palms, a streak of something black and wet across the forearm of his tailored suit jacket. He looked down at the torn knee of his Savile Row pants. For a moment, he was back in the schoolyard again, picked on and knocked down by assholes who were bigger and older. Like it did then, the misery of feeling powerless began to bubble up.

But then, the startled fury on the phone man’s face came back to him, and he was suddenly laughing. He had to stop this nonsense. He’d gotten off easy, Francis realized, considering how large the man was. He was lucky the guy hadn’t killed him.

Besides, he wasn’t powerless anymore, was he? he thought as he found his valise. He patted it lovingly before he lifted it and continued his pilgrimage north.

A snatch of grammar school Robert Frost came to him as he picked up his pace.

He recited to himself, But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

Chapter 68

“DADDY, DO MY ashes look okay? I told Grandpa to do a good job,” my five-year-old, Chrissy, said as we sat by the window inside the crowded Starbucks at 93rd and Broadway.

We’d just dropped off her siblings at school after church. Chrissy, who was in kindergarten now, luckily didn’t have to go in until noon. In our big family, one-on-one time was an extremely rare commodity. Not even a nasty killing spree would make me miss our Wednesday-morning Starbucks date.

“I don’t know. Let me see,” I said, reaching across the table, holding her tiny chin in my hand as I peered at her. I couldn’t help but kiss her elflike nose. “They look great, Chrissy. Grandpa did fine. And they go really well with your hot chocolate mustache.”

As she went back to her drink, I looked at the long line by the pastry case. Waiting for their morning fix of Seattle ’s main export were nannies with infants, tired-looking construction workers, and tired-looking men and women dressed in business clothes. Maybe ten percent of them, along with one of the baristas, had ashes.

I wondered with a cold chill if it was in the killer’s mind to shoot people who had ashes today. That he was going to do something was a given. Every indication was that today was the day. The only questions left were where and how.

I rubbed my eyes before I lifted my coffee and took a large gulp. My blood caffeine level had hit record highs in the past couple of sleepless days, but it couldn’t be helped. After last night’s end-of-day task force meeting, I’d spent much of the night Googling everything I could on Ash Wednesday.

Ash Wednesday was one of the most solemn days in the Catholic liturgical year. It was a day for contemplating one’s transgressions.

But whose transgressions was the killer trying to point out with the slayings? The dead kids’? Society’s? His own?

I caught my ash-streaked, mournful reflection in the plate glass.

Well, I was certainly stewing in my own lapses this morning, I thought, looking away. For not already putting an end to this horrible case.

As Chrissy played peekaboo with a neighboring toddler in a stroller, I checked my cell phone for the millionth time to see if I had missed any messages. I winced when only my Yankees-logo wallpaper appeared again. Emily had put an incredible rush on the print, but there was still no word.

I spun my phone on the chessboard tabletop as I looked out the window down Broadway. I could feel the moments slipping away from me, and there was nothing I could do.

Where and how? I thought. Where and how?

Chapter 69

MY CASE-DISTRACTED MIND still hadn’t come a hundred percent back online as I stepped with Chrissy into my apartment ten minutes later. Otherwise, I would have checked my caller ID before I snapped open my phone.

“What’s the story?” I yelled into it.

“What story?” my grandfather Seamus said. “Actually, who cares? Did you tell her yet?”

“Tell who what?”

“Mary Catherine, ya eedjit! See, I knew you’d forget. And with MC in such a riled knot of late. Does the song ‘Happy Birthday’ ring a bell, Detective?”

“Holy sh-… ugar,” I said. “No. I forgot.”

Eedjit was right! I thought. I’d blown this one big-time. I could at least have brought her back a muffin or something. What would Mary Catherine throw out of mine next? I wondered. I needed to address the situation, and pronto. I heard the tea kettle start to boil in the kitchen. Maybe I still had a shot.

“I’m all over it, Father,” I said, hanging up.

Mary was taking a mug down from the cabinet just inside the kitchen door.

“Mary. There you are,” I said, surprising her with a hug.

“Happy birthday!” I said as merrily as I could and went to plant a kiss on her cheek.

But as it turned out, I was the one who got the surprise present.

Mary Catherine turned her head, and our lips locked. At first, I pulled back as if I’d been Tasered, but then, before I knew it, my hand found the back of her neck and we were, well, making out would be the exact expression.

Mary’s unheeded mug slid off the counter and shattered.

I guess you could call it pretty hot-and-heavy making out.

“Mary Catherine!” Chrissy called a second later just outside the kitchen door.

Mary almost broke my nose as she ripped herself away from me. Her face was at least twenty shades redder than her strawberry-blond hair. My face felt like it was on fire. I couldn’t seem to close my mouth.

“Goddamn you, Mike,” she said before she fled out the doorway. Was she crying? Why was she crying? I was having trouble enough breathing. I heard the hall bathroom door slam a second later.

I was still standing there, brain-locked and blinking, when Chrissy came in. “Where’s MC?” she said.

“I’m not sure. I broke a mug, Chrissy. Could you get me the dustpan?”

Chapter 70

I WAS DOWN on my hands and knees, dazed and sweeping up, when my cell rattled.

“Hey, Mike,” Agent Parker said. “Get down here. I have news. I’m right outside your building.”

“Thank God,” I said, dumping the last of the shards into the garbage. “I mean, on my way!”

I quickly hollered, “I’m off to work, ’bye, Mary,” as I passed the still-closed bathroom door.

Was that the right thing to do? I wasn’t sure. I’d never made out with my kids’ nanny before.

I wiped the lip gloss off my chin in the elevator mirror on the way down to the street. Still tasting it, I pondered what the heck had just happened and how I felt about it.

Like I needed something else on my plate at this juncture.

“Goddamn you, Mike.”

Chapter 71

I CLIMBED INTO Emily’s double-parked Crown Vic. She was wearing a new white silk blouse and sleek beige skirt suit. With the case dragging on, she must have done some shopping, I realized.

Was it me, or was the blouse showing some pretty nice cleavage? I wiped my eyes. What the hell was happening to me?

“Feeling okay there, Mike?”

“Never better,” I said, smiling. “What’s up?”

Emily handed me a folder.

“We finally got the toxicology report back on the ashes found on the first victim, Jacob Dunning. Are you familiar with X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy?”

“Had one six months ago,” I said, nodding. “Doctor said I’m as clean as a whistle.”

“Listen closely, wiseass,” Emily said, ignoring my acerbic wit. “Basically, individual elements reflect X-ray light in different patterns. They ran the ashes through the machine, and it turns out most of it is regular cigarette tobacco. The twist is that they found traces of some very interesting substances as well that came from the killer’s sweat.”

“Like what kind of substances?” I said.

Emily lifted a clipboard.

“Several amphetamines and a drug called… Iressa. It’s a chemotherapy drug for lung cancer.”

I rubbed my face as I nodded.

“Hey, good work,” I said. “I’ll get Schultz to contact Sloan-Kettering and the other cancer centers and check out their patients. It’s starting to make a little more sense now in terms of motive. If this guy is terminal, maybe he made out some psycho bucket list. Maybe this is his way of going out with a bang.”

“Funny you should say bang,” Emily said, pointing to a name on the fax sheet. “Because the drugs aren’t the worst of it. There was evidence of something called pentaerythritol. It’s found in plastic explosives, Mike.”

Chapter 72

KIDNAPPING, CHILD MURDERS, and now plastic explosives? This nightmare case kept getting worse and worse. I unsuccessfully tried to wake myself out of it as Emily answered her encrypted cell phone.

“Hold on, Tom,” she said into it. “Let me put you on speaker.”

“We got the print back, Em,” FBI lab chief Tom Warriner said a moment later. “You’re not going to believe this. It’s a hit, but one that’s coded to COINTELPRO.”

“Cointelpro?” I said.

“The FBI’s counterintelligence program,” Emily said.

“The section attached to this was run out of the New York office,” Warriner continued. “The Domestic Terrorism Squad from the sixties. The code name attached is Shadowbox.”

“In Intelligence Squads, when the identity of a person is classified, they designate code names,” Emily explained with a roll of her eyes. “Like the CIA, the FBI spook division loves codes and passwords. James Bond, eat your heart out.”

She aimed her voice at her phone.

“So, what do you think, Tom? Our guy, this Shadowbox, was probably a confidential informant on a domestic terrorist group?”

Terrorism? I was still trying to absorb the plastic explosives angle.

“Most likely,” the FBI lab chief said.

“So, how do we get a name to match the code name?” I asked.

“I’ve tried twice to crack the old databases, but some COINTELPRO records seem to be missing,” Warriner said.

Emily snorted.

“I’ll bet. Into the ol’ memory hole you go. What the hell are we going to do? How do we get around that?”

“I’ve been asking around, and the best lead I can tell you is that you guys should go see John Browning,” Warriner said. “He’s the former agent who ran the group out of the New York office from ’sixty-eight to ’seventy-four. I tried to call him, but there’s no answer at his house up in Yonkers. I worked with Browning on a few things when I was a rookie tech. Sarcastic pain in the ass, but a mind like a steel trap. If he can’t tell you who Shadowbox is, no one can.”

Chapter 73

THE CROWN VIC’S V8 screamed like it meant it as we zigzagged north up the crowded Saw Mill River Parkway. Danica Patrick had nothing on Emily Parker, I thought as I white-knuckled the door handle.

Browning lived on a cul-de-sac near the Dunwoodie golf course. There was a U-Haul truck in his driveway. Please don’t be moved out, I prayed as we came to a hard stop behind it.

A wiry, clean-cut sixty- or maybe seventy-something-year-old in a St. John’s University sweatshirt came out of the garage, carrying a box of model trains. I noticed he’d gotten his ashes today as well.

“Help you?” he said, his intelligent blue eyes shifting quickly from me to Emily.

“We hope so,” Emily said, showing him her tin. “Tom Warriner sent us. It’s about CO-”

He lifted a pausing finger as a woman came out of the house across the street, carrying a tray of plants.

“It’s about your, um, previous line of work,” Emily finished in a lower voice.

“I see,” he said. “Come on in, then, I guess,” he said, waving us toward the open garage door.

“Finally heading to Florida,” he said after he closed the garage door behind him. “Just sold to a rent refugee. Yuppie couple from Manhattan. Said they wanted their Yorkies to have some room to stretch out. I managed to raise four daughters here, so maybe it’ll work out for them.”

“We need your help, John,” Emily said quickly. “We need to cut through a mountain of red tape, and we’re running out of time. In ’sixty-nine, you ran a CI named Shadowbox. His print just came up in the system. We think he has something to do with these kid killings that are going on in the city.”

“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.

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.”

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 south 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.

I frantically waved over the Hostage Rescue and Bomb Squad guys.

“Where to now?” Emily said with a pained look on her face as we hopped back into her car. “I’m running out of gas.”

“Financial district. Where else?” I said. “Mooney just showed up at the Stock Exchange.”

Chapter 88

SHACKLED TO THE three young men with high explosives, Francis X. Mooney stutter-stepped through the grand lobby of 11 Wall Street. Though the dozen NYPD and private Stock Exchange officers stationed there had guns trained at his head, they parted before him as he led his captives toward the metal detectors.

The officers kept pace half a step behind them like paparazzi with guns instead of cameras.

Francis’s heart beat in a way he’d never experienced before, like a bass drum at the end of a German opera. Fear and ecstasy commingled in his blood into something terrible and wonderful, something entirely new. He knew Quinn’s kid had been the deciding factor. He’d done the impossible. He was actually inside the New York Stock Exchange!

The Parrish boy tripped on some of the det cord and fell. Francis turned with a smile and gently helped him up off the polished stone.

“It’s not much further now, son. I promise,” he said.

Around the corner in the middle of the right-hand wall, he halted by the door he wanted. It led up some stairs to a door to the balcony above the trading floor where they rang the opening bell.

He’d been here once before. A client of his was going public with his biotech company, and Mooney had been invited to attend the ceremony. He’d stood behind the executive, smiling and clapping obediently, as the old-fashioned plate bell clanged the new trading day.

How many men had he helped to amass staggering amounts of unfair wealth? he thought. Too many to count. That’s why he was here. He was making up for that. For all of it.

He turned and faced the officers at his heels.

“We’re going through that door now. Alone. After I’m inside, I’m going to seal it with explosives. Follow and everyone dies. Thank you.”

Mooney opened the door, pulled the three young men through, then sealed it with PE-4. The explosive was pretty much useless because it wasn’t attached to a detonator, but how would they know that? It would deter them enough.

The yelling from the cavernous trading floor was palpable as they opened the door at the top of the stairs. He led the boys out onto the end of the balcony.

On the pompous granite walls hung huge American flags and neon blue NYSE banners. Every three feet, it seemed, was some kind of computer screen. On them scrolled the relentless march of numbers showing the ever-changing stock bids.

Below was pandemonium, a confusing mosh pit of men and women in business suits and colored smocks. They were yelling and typing into small computers hanging around their necks as they crowded by the carousel-like stock-trading desks. He stared down at the pathetic scurrying, the little ants scrambling for their crumbs. They’d thank him for this.

Mooney stepped up on the podium that stood by the balcony’s railing for the celebrities who rang the opening bell. He flicked the microphone on and thumped it with his taped-up hands.

“Stop!” Mooney yelled out over the trading floor.

A scary hush went through the chamber as traders and brokers stopped what they were doing and craned upward.

Mooney was weeping again. He was surprised to see that some of the traders on the floor had ashes on their foreheads. Were they really ready to share in the world’s suffering? To sacrifice themselves?

He took a deep breath.

Time to find out, he thought.

Chapter 89

THE MIDTOWN TRAFFIC had never seemed more impassable while Emily and I tried to carve a path downtown. Minute after precious minute slipped away as we screeched and slanted our way down Lexington through Turtle Bay and Murray Hill, the Flat Iron district, Gramercy Park, Union Square.

“So many neighborhoods, so little damn time,” I yelled with my ear cocked to the radio for the worst.

We were coming into SoHo when my phone rang. Was it over?

“Mooney just forced his way inside the Stock Exchange,” Chief Fleming told me.

“Wh-, wh-, what?” I screamed. “How the hell did he manage that!”

I couldn’t believe it. The security around the Stock Exchange had to be the highest in the city, maybe in the world. It seemed like all of southern Manhattan was one huge blockade after 9/11.

“Right after he snatched the St. Edward’s kids, the son of a bitch took the Exchange’s security chief’s kid from his doorman job at gunpoint. Then Mooney tangled himself, the students, and the doorman all together with the missing det cord and explosives. Dennis Quinn, the security chief, was manning the employee entrance when Mooney showed up, threatening to blow up his kid right on the street if Quinn didn’t let him inside. Quinn let him in. What the hell else was he supposed to do? It doesn’t matter now, does it?”

It sounded like Emily removed the muffler when she scraped the Crown Vic up onto the curb in front of Trinity Church six minutes later. Hopping out, I almost knocked down Chief Fleming, who was standing next to the NYPD Critical Incident bus, parked across the length of Broadway.

“Mooney’s blocked himself off in the balcony above the trading floor where they ring the opening bell,” my boss said over the wail of sirens that seemed to be coming from every direction. “He also just called nine-one-one. He’s made an offer. He says he’ll exchange the St. Edward’s students for their fathers. We have thirty minutes to get them here. We’re contacting them now.”

My head spun. Mooney was willing to exchange the kids for their fathers but not for me? Emily and I scrambled to put it together.

“You kidnap two rich kids, bring them down here, and now you want their fathers?” Emily said. “Why not just grab them? Mooney’s a proven freaking mastermind at snatching people.”

How did any of it make sense? And what the hell did the son of a bitch really want?

“What about the people on the trading floor?” I said.

“A lot of them got out. But there’s still maybe three hundred financial workers holed up behind the trading desks. Except for the stairwell to the balcony, he hasn’t sealed any doors, thank God.”

Chief Fleming led us down the block toward the employee entrance at the corner of Broad and Wall. Task force uniforms and tactical cops had taken up positions on both sides of the street. Beneath the giant American flag on the face of the landmark building, scared-shitless-looking brokers and traders in colored smocks and ID necklaces were being evacuated north up Broad Street.

“Snipers?” Emily said.

“That’s the rub,” my boss said. “He’s got the detonator taped to his hands. Even with a head shot, Mooney could still manage to pull the trigger.”

We hurried back up to Broadway once the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team truck arrived. Even superstoic Chow seemed subdued as he stared down the world-famous narrow trench of Wall Street.

He pointed to an overhead satellite map of the Financial district he already had up on the PowerPoint screen.

“All right. First thing we need to do is get that giant flag down off the front of the building. My sniper observers are heading into this office building across Broad Street here. These long windows between the columns on the edifice of the Exchange look onto the trading floor. I place the balcony where Mooney is holed up about fifteen feet to the right of this central window. If we can get him to move maybe even ten feet back, we can blow out the window and angle a shot at him.”

“What about the fact that the detonator is taped to his hands?” Fleming said.

“We’re going to use an extremely high-velocity Barrett M107 fifty-caliber sniper rifle. Coupled with a nonincendiary sabot round, we should be able to minimize collateral damage. We’ll go for the detonator itself before he gets a chance to set it off.”

Emily and I stared at each other, shaking our heads in dismay. What were the odds of coming away from this thing without more loss of life?

“I know,” Chow said. “It’s not pretty by any stretch, but it’s the only tactical play we have.”

Chapter 90

THAT DISMAL NEWS was still ringing loudly in our ears as the St. Edward’s students’ fathers showed up in a squad car.

Tall and fair with graying executive hair, Howard Parrish looked like a CEO out of central casting. I recognized his face from the tabloids due to a very messy divorce he’d gone through the year before. Edwin Mason, short, dark, and wearing glasses, had more of a professorial air in his jeans and sports coat.

“What the hell is this about, my boy? Tell me this instant!” Parrish said by way of greeting as he stepped onto the NYPD’s Critical Incident bus.

“Howard’s right. Could someone please give us the straight story?” Edwin Mason said with a pleading calm.

“Your boys are being held hostage in the Stock Exchange by a man named Francis Mooney,” I said bluntly. “He’s the man who’s responsible for abducting and killing several wealthy young adults in the past four days.”

Parrish’s face went hypertension-tomato-red.

“That damned school sent home a bulletin just yesterday about beefed-up security. How could this be allowed to happen? And why my boy? There’s hundreds of kids at that school. Why mine?”

“There’s more to it than that, isn’t there?” Mason said, looking steadily into my eyes. “You’re leaving something out.”

“There is more to it,” I said. “Mooney contacted us a few minutes ago. He said he’s willing to do an exchange. Your boys for you.”

“For us?” Parrish said, bamboozled. “You mean he wants to hold us hostage instead? Why?”

“In addition to being obviously unstable, Mooney has a radical-left history that goes back to the sixties,” Emily said. “Bottom line, he’s extremely dissatisfied with wealthy people. There’s a whole quasi-political motive wrapped up in his actions. At least, that’s what he seems to believe.”

“Goddamn liberals!” Parrish said, his voice cracking. “The goddamn liberals are actually going to kill my son!”

Mason took off his glasses and put them back on again.

“Does why really matter, Howard?” he said wearily. “Our boys are in real trouble.”

“We’re doing all we can to resolve this,” I cut in. “It’s entirely up to you how you want to play things. We can’t force you to exchange yourselves. We can’t even advise it. There’s no way to guarantee your safety. But if you volunteer, we won’t get in your way. In fact, during the exchange, we might be able to create an opportunity to resolve things.”

“Volunteering isn’t a choice,” Mason said after a second. “My wife died six years ago. My son is the only thing I treasure in this world. Send me in.”

Chewing on a pinkie nail, Parrish stared at the bus floor between his wingtips, deliberating for a few moments.

“Yes, okay,” he finally said. “Me, too. Send me in, too, of course.”

Chapter 91

MY HEART WENT out to the two CEOs as we exchanged their coats for bulletproof vests. Many parents believe that they would gladly give up their lives for their children’s, but these men were actually being given the choice. The simple, staggering courage they were showing blew me and every other cop in the room away.

“I don’t want to die, Edwin,” Parrish said as his eyes welled with tears. He seemed to be speaking more to himself than to anyone there. “But hey, I’ve led a good life. Been really, really fortunate. I always tried to do my best. And if I do go, at least my money will go to my boy and a good cause: the AIDS Research Alliance.”

“Well said, Howard,” Edwin Mason agreed, squeezing Parrish’s shoulder. “That’s the right way to look at things. My dough is destined for Amfar. Millions of people will benefit from what we achieved.”

Wait a second, I thought. Charities again? Something suddenly occurred to me.

“Who does your legal work, Mr. Mason? Who did your will?” I said.

“Ericsson, Weymouth and Roth,” Mason said.

I don’t know whose eyes went wider at the mention of Mooney’s firm, Emily’s or mine.

“That’s funny. Small world. Mine, too,” said Parrish.

Emily and I faded into the corner of the bus.

“Charities? Wills?” she said. “This is definitely connected. Mooney was the head of Trusts and Estates, wasn’t he?”

“Wait a second. Damn it!” I said. “There was something Mooney said in our last conversation. Something about the Ash Wednesday Gospel.”

I whipped out my cell and speed-dialed Seamus. Sometimes having a priest in the family came in handy.

“Listen up. I need your help here, Seamus,” I said. “No monkeying around. Today’s Gospel. Read me today’s Gospel.”

“Don’t tell me you weren’t listening? Remind me to box your ears next time we meet, ye heathen. Okay, I have it right here. Let’s see. Matthew six, one to four: ‘Beware of your practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by them. For then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. Thus, when you give alms, do not sound the trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and the streets that they may be praised by men. Truly, I say unto you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be in secret, and your Father who sees what is in secret will reward you.’”

“Wait a second. Read that back about the alms.”

“‘That your alms may be in secret,’” Seamus said.

That was it!

I grabbed Emily as I slapped the phone closed.

“I got it! Mooney’s giving alms in secret!”

“Giving what?” Emily said, confused.

“Alms. Charity. Don’t you see? In every case, the family had a philanthropic bent. And in every case, the child was the sole beneficiary of mega wealth. When Mooney learned he was going to die, he concocted this whole thing as a way to cut out the child and donate as much money as he could directly to charity!”

Emily stood there with her mouth open.

“That clever little weasel. That explains the deal with the tests he gave the kids. He was trying to see if they were socially conscious enough to be allowed to inherit their parents’ wealth. That explains why he let the Haas girl live. But how does that help us now?”

“I’ll tell you how,” I said. “Mooney doesn’t want to exchange the fathers for the kids. He’s not going to exchange anything. Mason and Parrish are both single. Once Mooney sees the fathers, he’s going to kill all of them. The fathers, the sons, and himself. The money won’t even have to wait for the fathers’ natural lifetimes to expire in order for it to go to charity. It’ll happen right now.”

Carol Fleming came over.

“What’s the story, guys? Are we sending the fathers in or not?”

“No way, boss,” I said. “But I think I have a plan.”

Chapter 92

“LET’S TALK ABOUT the horrors of the modern world that the greed in this room has helped to create,” Mooney said into the balcony microphone.

“Let’s go over the crimes that all of you here have helped to perpetrate. The environmental travesties, the worker exploitation and deaths, the public corruption and tax evasion. Do you care about the black lung and asbestosis that your corporate masters inflict on their workers? The pollution that your holy shareholders and investors condone?”

Mooney looked down at their blank faces.

“I was like you. I slaved for the corporate machine, protecting it from the law in ways regular people will never be privy to. Protected illegal price fixes and unethical policies against millions of regular working-class people. I saw crimes of unthinkable magnitude. I saw pristine waterways irrevocably befouled with pollution. No one was held responsible. No one went to jail. Why is that? Can anyone tell me?

“By the way, I can see that many of you here are grossly overweight. But what percentage of the world’s population is starving as we have our little talk here? Anyone have the answer? Don’t be shy.”

Chapter 93

IT TOOK US five minutes to confer with my boss and the Hostage Rescue Team chief Tom Chow. Chow made the final arrangements over his tactical mic as Emily and I pulled on ceramic bomb vests.

“What’s the story now, Detective?” Howard Parrish said as we emerged from the bus. “We’re not going in now? What about my boy?”

“Something new has come to light. It’s our best chance to resolve this thing without any more innocent people getting hurt. We’re going to do the best we can, sir,” Emily said.

“That’s not good enough. Fuck that! I want my son alive. If you can’t guarantee that, then I want to go instead of him. I demand to!”

I stopped and held the executive by his elbow.

“Listen to me, Mr. Parrish,” I said. “I guarantee you that I will bring your son back to you alive.”

We walked away.

“What the hell are you doing, Mike? How can you make a promise like that?” Emily said under her breath as we headed down Wall Street toward the Stock Exchange entrance.

“Easy,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “If things go south, I won’t be around for him to yell at me.”

Chow met us at the security barricades and briefed us a final time while we walked through the maze of steel.

“Everything is in place,” he finally said, stopping by the Exchange’s door. “The rest is up to you two.”

Emily and I passed the metal detectors in the huge empty lobby. We walked silently, thinking our own thoughts as we stepped down the hall.

“Good luck, Detective Bennett. This works, I’ll buy you dinner,” Emily said as I stopped by the door that led to the balcony stairwell.

“Hope you brought your American Express card, Agent Parker,” I said as she continued on, heading for the trading floor. “Because if this works, I’m planning on about fifteen before-dinner drinks.”

Chapter 94

COMING DOWN THE hall, Parker was grateful for the speed with which all this was happening. There was no time to think. Which was good. If she’d had to think about things, she knew she’d be walking in the opposite direction.

A couple of Stock Exchange cops were crouched by the last security station, staring through the window of the entrance to the trading floor. Parker badged them.

“Where is he?”

A couple of brokers cringing behind the trading desks whispered loudly.

“Watch it, lady. That guy’s nuts.”

“He’s got a gun,” a pudgy white guy with thinning black hair told her.

She stepped out into the space.

“You actually thought you’d get away with it, didn’t you, shit for brains! Yes, I’m talking to you, scumbag!”

“Who are you?” Mooney called over the microphone.

“Me? I’m a moral person who went to work today,” Emily screamed. “You, on the other hand, are a common murderer, a killer of children, a serial killer, and probably a pervert.”

“Hey, lady!” one of the brokers said. “Shut up! You’re going to get us all killed!”

“I am not!” Mooney yelled.

“I am not!” Emily said, mimicking him. “Who are you kidding? You got off on killing every one of those kids.”

“Those kids, as you call them, were worthless, useless. They deserved to die!” Mooney screamed. “Their parents should have educated them better. Should have taught them the importance of being human.”

“Oh, you’re teaching all of us humanity?” Emily screamed. “My mistake. I thought you were just killing children!”

Chapter 95

CHECKING MY WATCH, I knelt down next to the tactical “mouse hole” the HRT guys had already made into the hallway wall to avoid the explosives. At the top of the narrow stairs, I unscrewed the fluorescent light and laid it down carefully on the dusty, worn marble tiles and slowly opened the door.

About twenty feet away with his back to me, Mooney stood at the front railing of the balcony with his captives, yelling down at Emily. Between us, dividing the balcony in half at an angle, was a five-foot-wide stripe of bright sunlight that fell from the Stock Exchange’s front window. I stared at the light intently for a moment before I opened my mouth.

“Francis! Over here! Hey, don’t listen to her!” I called to him.

Mooney swung around toward me, angry and confused. He shook the detonator at me.

“You’re sneaking up on me? Try something, and I’ll do it!” he screamed. “Right now. I’ll do everyone! Where are the fathers? Why is no one listening to me?”

I stared fearfully at the two high school kids and the security chief’s son, all of whom Mooney had bound himself to. They were pale, listless, sweating, eyes glazed with stress and shock. I thought of my oldest boy, Brian, only a few years younger. I wanted them to live. I wanted us all to live. I had to make this happen. Somehow.

“Francis! Calm down, man! It’s me, Mike Bennett,” I said, raising my hands slowly above my head. “I’m not sneaking up on you. I have the fathers in the hall here behind me, like you said. I’ll let them in. You let the boys go. Will you work with me?”

Mooney took a step toward me. His eyes behind his glasses were gleaming now, filled with an unsettling intensity. His taped-together hands holding the detonator were shaking now. I watched his right-hand index finger twitch as it hovered over its trigger.

I struggled to come up with something to calm him down. Emily’s tirade was supposed to be just a distraction, but it had gotten him so riled up, he might set the plastic off by accident.

“Where are they?” Mooney demanded, peering into the darkened doorway at my back.

“At the bottom of the stairwell, Francis. They’re waiting to come up,” I said.

“You’re lying,” Mooney said.

“No,” I said, making eye contact with him as I shook my head. “No more lies, Francis. We just want what’s best for everybody. For you. For those kids. The fathers really want to take their sons’ places. They appreciate that you’ve given them the option, in fact.”

“Yeah, like I believe that,” Mooney said. He took another step closer, his eyes squinting as he tried to peer deeper into the dim stairwell.

“I won’t let anyone go until the fathers come up those stairs and stand in front of me. That’s the deal, Mike. No negotiating. Bring them up here right now.”

I turned around as if I heard something behind me.

“Okay, Francis,” I said. “They’re on the stairs right behind me now. Why don’t we do this? Why don’t you come forward a little and look in the doorway first. You can verify that it’s them. Then you can untangle one of the kids. I don’t want you to think it’s a trick.”

Mooney stood there, thinking about it.

“Okay,” he said, taking another step.

As he came forward, I watched the sunlight from the window glance off his shoe. The light came up his leg, his torso, his two hands grasping the detonator as if in prayer.

“Got him,” the FBI sniper across the street said into the radio in my ear.

I dove to the floor.

Chapter 96

STANDING IN THE dusty light, Mooney looked at me in confusion as I hit the deck. Then he turned toward the window I’d lured him in front of.

The shattering of the long front window of the Exchange seemed to happen after Mooney was hit. One second, he was standing there, and the next, the window shattered spectacularly, and he was down, sitting on the floor.

The blood pumping from Mooney’s wrists looked black on the bright faded marble. I scrambled up as Mooney fruitlessly tried to squeeze the detonator trigger. He was having trouble because his blown-apart hands and wrists were now only barely attached to his arms.

The.50 caliber sniper bullets had missed the detonator but hit him through both wrists, completely severing the nerves in both hands.

I felt sorry for Mooney as he wriggled on the floor, moaning and pumping blood.

But that was before he whispered, “Amen,” and lurched up and forward, going for the trigger with his chin.

The third shot came before I’d closed half the distance. The final bullet caught Mooney on his temple. Instead of falling forward, he fell over safely to the side.

“Cease fire!” I yelled into my radio as a thunder of steps came up the balcony stairs.

“No!” I screamed at Jeremy Mason, who’d turned to look at what was left of Francis X. Mooney.

I knelt down in front of the young man tangled in the strings of explosives, shielding him from the sight of Mooney’s body. He’d been through enough. We all had.

“Don’t move, son. It’s going to be okay now,” I said, wiping at the madman’s blood freckled across the boy’s face.

Chapter 97

I WAS TRYING to extricate the boys when one of the bomb techs tackled me from behind and shoved me back toward the stairs.

The St. Edward’s students came down less than five minutes later. Both of the dads were crying openly as they met them in the building’s foyer. Even the burly security chief, Quinn, sobbed as he wrapped his arms around his doorman son, who appeared a few minutes later.

The cops and brokers crowded outside on Broad Street broke into a cheer as the fathers and sons came out. Someone started up a chant of U-S-A for some reason. Relieved that we were both still alive, Emily and I hugged before heartily joining in.

It took the bomb techs half an hour to secure and remove the explosives. After they left, I went back up to the balcony with Emily and the Crime Scene guys. Head shots are horrible, and this one was no exception. Mooney had actually been shot out of his shoes. I stared at the bloody gouges the.50 caliber rounds had also taken out of the old building’s stone walls. Mooney had made an impact, all right.

I stood there silently with Emily as the medical examiner zippered the body bag closed.

“Check this out,” one of the CSU guys said, coming up to me with a sheet of paper in a plastic evidence bag. “It was stuffed into the pocket of Mooney’s jacket.”

WARNING TO A WORLD ON THE EVE OF DESTRUCTION was its title. It was a litany of what was wrong with the world. Facts about poverty and famine and disease. Across the bottom, Mooney had scribbled NO ONE IS LISTENING! in red pen.

Emily lifted an eyebrow at me as I removed the sheet from the plastic. I tore it in half. Then in half again.

“That bastard invalidated everything he had to say the second he started hurting innocent people,” I said, ripping it a third time. “Screw his message, whether it’s true or false. I’ll take C, none of the above.”

I felt Parker’s hand on the back of my neck as I tossed the ripped paper off the balcony.

“Amen, Mike,” she said as the torn pieces disappeared among the stock tickets that littered the floor.

Chapter 98

EMILY GOT OFF easy. She didn’t have to buy dinner that night after all. Parrish and Mason got together and insisted on throwing a dinner for the entire task force at none other than the famous Tavern on the Green on Central Park West.

They rented out one of the small dining rooms for the nearly one hundred cops who showed up. Schultz and Ramirez, who’d arrived early to the open bar, looked like they were into double-digit Bellinis. Most likely looking at a pay-grade increase, they wrapped their arms around each other when the hired ten-piece swing band started playing “ New York, New York.”

“I want to wake up in a city that doesn’t sleep,” they sang, Rockette-kicking infront of the laughing tuxedoed musicians. “To find I’m A number one, top of the list, king of the hill.”

“See, I keep telling you this department is one class act,” I said, taking Emily by the hand. I danced her around the room with its crystal chandeliers and hand-carved mirrors. When we weren’t dancing, we drank. Champagne, of course. By the time we sat down to dinner, we were laughing deliriously, too loudly probably, and not caring in the slightest.

The waiters were all over us in a way I’d never experienced before. French champagne glass after French champagne glass. Out of curiosity, I peeked at the menu and noticed that they were three- and four hundred dollars a bottle.

“What you did at the Exchange took guts, Emily,” I said, tossing back another thirty-dollar glass. “You really looked good in there.”

Veuve Clicquot suddenly sprayed from my nose as Parker found my thigh under the table.

“Isn’t that a coincidence?” she said, staring into my eyes as she knocked back her own glass. “You look good in here, Detective.”

Emily and I both sprinted through the dinner for some reason. Our spoons clacked on the tiramisu plates before most of the cops at our table had even started.

“Where are you guys going?” my boss asked as we said our quick good-byes. “You’re the stars of the party. Parrish and Mason haven’t even gotten here yet.”

“Uh,” I said, “Emily has to, uh…”

“Catch a flight,” she finished for me. “Got to get home tonight. Back down to DC. Boy, I can’t miss that plane.”

The taxi ride back to Emily’s hotel was hot and heavy and way too short. It consisted of what every perfect New York City evening is made-the swirling Times Square lights, silk, nylon, sharp red nails, a grinning, envious cabbie.

We almost knocked down a high school senior class from Missouri as we speed-walked to the hotel’s elevator. The elevator door was closing when I stuck out my arm at the last second. The door rolled back open.

“What the hell are you doing?” Emily said.

“I just remembered something,” I said tentatively.

“It’s the nanny, isn’t it?”

I didn’t say anything.

“It is, Mike. It’s definitely the nanny, whether you realize it or not. Oh, well.”

She kissed me for the last time then. She grabbed my lapel and slammed her lips into mine viciously. She seemed so warm this close. I wanted to get closer. I don’t think I can properly express how much I wanted to ride that elevator up.

Then Emily even more viciously shoved me away from her. She actually kicked me in the knee with a high heel to get me moving out of the elevator car.

“Your loss, cop,” she spat, extremely pissed and extremely hot with her blouse tails out, her flushed cheeks, and red hair mussed. “Your fucking loss, Bennett, you goddamn asshole.”

My breath went away as I watched the vision of Emily Parker erased by the elevator door.

My loss, I thought to myself.

“Damn fucking right,” I said to the doorman on my way out.

Chapter 99

I WAS STILL feeling no pain as I got home. There were streamers and a hallway full of balloons. An extra-large Carvel sheet cake was defrosting in the fridge. Seamus, master of ceremonies for MC’s surprise bash, held court in the kitchen, directing the decorating and food prep.

“But, Grandpa, if this is a party, who’s going to DJ?” Shawna said.

“Who do you think?” Seamus said, offended. “Sister Sheilah doesn’t call me ‘Father Two Turntables and a Microphone’ for nothing, you know.”

“What about the clown, Grandpa?” Chrissy, our baby, wanted to know. “And I don’t see any balloon animals.”

“It’s on the list, child. Please, have ye no faith?” Seamus said, lifting his clipboard. “Now, Julia. How close are we with the pigs in a blanket?”

When everything was ready, I called upstairs to Mary Catherine’s cell phone.

“Mary, I just got a call into work, and Seamus is nowhere to be found. Could you come down for emergency babysitting?”

“Give me five minutes, Mike,” she said sadly.

She was there in three.

“Hello?” Mary Catherine said as she stepped slowly into the darkened apartment.

I hit the lights.

“Surprise!” we yelled.

Mary Catherine started crying as all the kids lined up and handed her their gifts with a hug. There were a lot of Starbucks cards and World’s Best Teacher mugs. When Hallmark starts its World’s Best Nanny line, we’ll be the first customers. I thought MC was going to need resuscitation when Chrissy handed over her present: a homemade salt-dough doll of Chrissy herself.

“How old are you now?” I said when I caught Mary alone in the kitchen.

“That’s a rude question to ask a lady,” Mary Catherine said.

“Nineteen?” I guessed. “No, wait. Twenty-two?”

“I’m thirty, Mike. So there. Are you happy?”

I was genuinely surprised. MC looked like a college kid. So that explained it, her nuttiness. Turning thirty. Women didn’t like that or something, right?

“Well, at least you’re calling me Mike again instead of Mr. Bennett. I must have done something right. Saints preserve us.”

I produced the gift I had gotten on the way home from Emily’s hotel. Striemer Jewelers on 47th was actually closed when I arrived, but the owner, Marvin, who was working late, owed me a favor.

“If this is about our, eh, collision, all is forgiven, Mike,” she said, staring at the small box. “I’ve already forgotten it.”

“Open it.”

She did. Inside was an amethyst pendant on a white gold chain, her birthstone.

“But,” she said. “This is… How can we…”

“You tell me,” I said into her ear as I put the necklace on her. “I don’t know a damn thing about anything.”

An aching expression of sadness was in Mary Catherine’s face as her eyes went from the sparkling pendant to me.

“We’ll talk after all that champagne wears off, Mike,” she said as she started to leave. I tried to grab her arm on the way out, but I missed, and she was gone. Second time tonight, I thought. Way to go, Mr. Smooth.

“Check me out!” Seamus yelled from the living room. I lifted my cake as the sound of an electric guitar started up. What now?

Seamus was standing in front of the TV. In his hands was the plastic guitar from the kids’ Guitar Hero game. His eyes were closed, and he was biting his lip as he wailed the “Welcome to the Jungle” solo. I don’t know what was louder, his Slash impression, the kids’ shrieks of laughter, or my own.

“Well, what do you know?” I said, gleefully atomic-dropping down onto the couch in the middle of my guys for a front-row seat. “The clown showed up to the party after all.”

Chapter 100

I WAS STILL catching up on Detective Division reports from the Mooney case two weeks later. Unfortunately, having my paperwork done for me had lasted exactly until the task force was disbanded.

The last and most aggravating detail of the case continued to stare at me, usually from the cover of a newspaper, morning after morning. What the hell had happened to Dan Hastings, the abducted Columbia kid?

I was banging out my fourth backed-up incident report of the morning when Chief Fleming came rap-rap-rapping at my office door. In her hand was the only perk of working at One Police Plaza, authentic takeout from neighboring Chinatown.

We ate in her much larger office. Outside her window, a big yellow sun shone brightly off the honking, unmoving Brooklyn Bridge traffic.

I scanned the East River for bodies floating among the garbage beneath the bridge as I worked my chopsticks. I believe in a working lunch.

The chief pointed at the New York Post on the desk behind her as we cracked fortune cookies.

“Seen the latest?” she said.

“Let me guess. ‘Mike Bennett, slacker, still too dumb to locate missing Ivy Leaguer’?”

“It’s not about you for a change. The first victim, Jacob Dunning-his father has created a charitable foundation in his kid’s name.”

I managed to roll my eyes and shake my head at the same time.

“Wow. Exactly what Mooney wanted,” I said, chewing. “Exactly what Mooney was hoping for when he blew the poor kid’s head off.”

“I don’t know, Mike. Isn’t some good coming out of this thing better than the alternative?” she said. “What would you do with all that money?”

“I don’t know,” I said after a moment’s reflection. I lifted a napkin and wiped orange sauce off my cheek.

“With my luck, I’ll never have that kind of problem. But I’ll tell you one thing. I’d burn it before I’d do exactly what my kid’s murderer wanted me to do.”

“You’re cold, Mike, you know that?” Carol said as her phone rang. She smiled and nodded as she lifted the receiver. “I like that in a cop.

“No shit!” she suddenly said. “Okay, okay. I’ll send somebody by right away.”

She looked dumbstruck as she racked her phone.

“Your ship just came in. Troopers picked up Dan Hastings along the turnpike in South Jersey. They took him home to his father’s boat.”

Chapter 101

I MET GORDON Hastings in the stateroom of his yacht, the Teacup Tempest, half an hour later. The Scottish media mogul was as sleek as a royal otter in his European-cut double-breasted suit. It was a far cry from the slept-in Margaritaville attire he was wearing at our first encounter.

Call me bitter, but staring at him, I couldn’t forget his drunkenness, rudeness, and stupidity, and his trying to take a swing at me. Worst of all was the fact that Hastings ’s New York Mirror had led the NYPD smear job that had started three days after we took care of Mooney.

Accusations of overkill and police brutality were being lodged on a daily basis at Mooney’s miraculous takedown. In fact, law enforcement use of.50 caliber ammunition had become the latest TV talking-head topic. How did that happen? I wondered.

“I want to apologize for how I acted,” Hastings said in his Scottish accent. He gave me his best James Bond grin as he offered his hand. “It was unconscionable, inappropriate, and foolish.”

“You couldn’t be more correct,” I told him, ignoring his hand as I went to talk to his son.

Dan Hastings was at the head of the enormous dining room table, scarfing down a plate of salmon, when I came in and closed the door. A mound of caviar in a sterling silver serving bowl waited by his elbow.

“I’m glad you made it back, son,” I said, shaking the handicapped college kid’s hand. “I’m Mike Bennett, the detective in charge of the Mooney case. I’d like to go over what happened to you.”

“Well, the important thing is that the son of a bitch is dead, right?” Dan said with a weird smile.

“Yes, he certainly is,” I said. “I just need to finish the paperwork. I need you to tell me what happened to you from the beginning.”

Dan nodded as he hit a scoop of caviar. I noticed a slight tremble in his hand as he washed it down with some white wine.

“Let’s see,” he said, chewing. “I was coming out of the library and someone called me over by one of the campus buildings. The next thing I knew, I felt a blow at the back of my head. I woke up hours later in a cave of some sort. I never saw anyone. I was tied up, but after two weeks, I eventually got free. I told all this to the troopers.”

“Humor me,” I said with a grin. “How did you, um, how did you manage to survive for two weeks?”

There was a subtle hitch in his breath.

“There was food there,” he said, avoiding my eyes. “After a week, I finally decided to try to crawl out.”

“Wow, that’s heroic,” I said. “It must have been brutal.”

I’m not sure whether Dan or the silverware jumped higher as I suddenly brought my fist down on the table. I sat down on the table right beside him.

“Maybe everybody else is willing to swallow your bullshit, son, but you obviously haven’t looked into my eyes yet. I’m the person who has to clean up the messes other people leave behind. My only consolation is that I can smell lies from a very great distance.

“You’re a terrible liar, Dan. That’s not a bad thing. It’s actually a virtue in my book. It means you’re new to the world of being a bad person. But you need to stop lying to me. I won’t put up with it.”

He tried to look into my eyes but failed. He lowered his head toward his plate.

“It was Galina,” he mumbled. “It was all Galina’s idea.”

I checked my notes. Galina Nesser was his Russian girlfriend. Christ, what a punk. Right out of the box, he throws his girlfriend under the bus.

“She and her uncle cooked up the whole scheme,” he said. “It had nothing to do with the other kidnappings. They said we could piggyback it. What the hell you want from me, man? I’m handicapped!”

I scribbled in my pad, laid it down, stared at him.

“No, you’re more like an insult to handicapped people,” I said.

“What’s five million dollars to a man like my father?” Dan said as he wept. “I just wanted to get away from him. You don’t know what he’s like. His guilt. I hate it. I hate him. I just wanted to get away. I just wanted to be alone.”

That’s where Dan was wrong. I did understand. I hated and wanted to get away from his father, too.

We could have charged Dan Hastings with a host of things-fraud, misleading an investigation. I decided to give him the worst punishment of all. I grabbed the back of his wheelchair and pushed him back into the stateroom.

“Mr. Hastings, your son has something to tell you.”

“What?” he said. “What is it, Dan?”

“I did it, Dad. I wasn’t kidnapped. It was a trick. I took your money. It had nothing to do with that Mooney guy.”

Gordon Hastings’s regal face imploded like a demolished building. I guess he wasn’t too jazzed about my smiling, told-you-so expression.

“I’m not pressing charges, Officer,” he said, his shock replaced by the sneer that was his natural expression, “if that’s what you were hoping for. I want you off this vessel.”

“What a coincidence. I want me off this vessel, too. Even more than you,” I said on my way out.

Chapter 102

GETTING INTO MY car in the Chelsea Piers marina parking lot, I still couldn’t believe it. What was wrong with that kid? Setting up such complicated money transfers would have been impressive enough on its own. Dan had even convinced that crazy kid to platform-jump off a bridge in order to get him his money.

Wheelchair or no wheelchair, the kid was clever and charming and rich. Wasn’t that enough? If he hated his father so much, why couldn’t he muster up the guts and leave?

Dan must have liked all that money too much, I realized. Leaving would have been hard. Leaving would have required sacrificing luxury. Dan wanted to have his hate, yet not have to pay for it. Hate costs. Even Mooney could have told him that.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong, I decided, looking at the shining yacht. The rich really were just like you and me. Just as stupid, petty, shortsighted, screwed-up, flawed. Just as human through and through.

Staring out at the yuppies doing their Tiger Woods impressions beside the boats, I thought of someone. I scrolled down through my speed-dial list until I found what I wanted and hit the Call button.

“VICAP. Parker speaking.”

“Agent Parker,” I said. “Bennett here. How are you?”

“Mike!” she yelled. She actually sounded happy to hear from me. She must have forgotten how we had said goodbye at her hotel.

“Hey, how are things up there? That party was fun. Man, was I trashed.”

“Not more than me,” I said. “Listen, I just found out we were right when we thought there was something funny about the Hastings kid’s kidnapping. It turns out it was complete bullshit. The kid cooked it up with his Russian squeeze. They did it to rob his father. Nice, huh? Little early Father’s Day present for the old man.”

“Wow,” she said. She was silent for a long beat.

“When Francis X. and I got into our shouting match, he said that today’s youth was worthless. Sometimes I think maybe he was right. Maybe this world has lost its way.”

I tried to say something then, but when I opened my mouth, no words came out. I only wanted what all parents want, a nice place for their kids to live in. It was scary and painful to think of all the crazy, bad things that could happen, the kind of bleak future that might await them.

I looked out at the water. Though the day was bright, the air whistling in through my cracked-open window was harsh, biting, frigid.

“I don’t know about the world, Emily,” I finally said. “All I know is that Mooney is dead, and we’re still on the job.”

I started the car and cranked up the heat.

“That might not exactly be happily ever after,” I said, “but what the hell. It’s a start.”

We managed to get hold of Detective Michael Bennett for an extremely rare interview…

How long have you been working in the police force?

I’ve been a cop for sixteen years now. I started out with the NYPD before doing a stint with the FBI before I got married. These days I’m back with the NYPD as a senior detective on the Major Case Squad. I’m a troubleshooter, negotiator; I guess really I’m just whatever is needed by whoever needs it.

What is the hardest part of your job?

There are many tough parts to the job but one of the things I find the hardest is telling people that someone close to them has been murdered. But seeing the pain on their faces makes me all the more determined to track down the killers.

So what is the most satisfying part of your job?

Well it’s certainly not the salary! Plus the hours are demanding and don’t allow me to spend as much time with my family as I’d like to. But when a case comes together and you find the person who has brought misery into the lives of good people, it makes all the sacrifices worthwhile.

Have you ever considered quitting the NYPD to do something else?

Since the major hostage incident at St Patrick’s Cathedral a couple of years back, people have made me out to be a bit of a celebrity cop. I had some nice job offers to do things like corporate security management for ABC, and I guess I considered it fleetingly. It would be a lot safer for myself and my family, I’d have regular hours so could spend more time with my kids, plus we would be a lot better off financially. But when it comes down to it, I’m not ready to hand in my shield just yet. Despite all the crap that comes with it, I love being a cop, it’s who I am.

It must have been terrifying for you when Billy Meyer (aka the Teacher) got into your apartment and held your family hostage?

It’s every cop’s worst nightmare that the guy you’re chasing gets to your family. The only time I’ve felt fear like it was when I heard my wife had cancer. I’ll never allow danger to get that close to my family again. I couldn’t bear to lose them too.

Losing your wife must have been devastating. What kept you going through that time?

It was the hardest challenge that I’ve ever had to face. It’s left a permanent hole in my heart. I still miss her every day. If it wasn’t for the kids, I wouldn’t have made it through. They give me a reason to wake up in the morning. I also hold on to the hope that, if there is a life after this one, I might be able to see her again.

As a single father, how do you manage to do such a stressful job whilst looking after ten children?

Well I get a lot of help from Seamus, and Mary Catherine is a lifesaver. I wouldn’t be able to do it without her. She can take ninety-nine percent of the credit for how the kids have coped without their mother. My kids are by far the greatest achievement in my life. Even when I’ve had a real tough day, when I come home all that fades away and although it isn’t exactly peaceful, to me it’s bliss.

It sounds like you’d be lost without Mary Catherine.

I would, totally. She’s an amazing woman. She feels like part of the family now. Although I don’t know how she puts up with us sometimes.

What do you do in your spare time?

As you can imagine I don’t get a lot of spare time! But what time I do have I spend with my kids. I coach my son Eddie’s basketball team. He’s on the JV. Ricky plays on the varsity squad. When things get stressful I put on some eighties rock music – there’s nothing like a bit of AC/DC to help you unwind.

What does the future hold in store for Michael Bennett?

Well I hope I can keep doing the job I love. I think I’ve got a few years left in me yet!