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  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,” Em
ily 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. Edwards. 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 st
ifling 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.