Worst Case

by James Patterson

  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 counterterror 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, nine/eleven, 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.