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.
“Yo
u 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.
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