Step on a Crack (14 page)

I HEARD A PHONE RING from the open front door of the command bus as I laid the murdered priest down on an EMS stretcher. I didn’t need caller ID to figure out who it was. Instead of sprinting to grab the phone, though, I let it ring on as I carefully closed the priest’s eyelids with my thumb.

“Bennett!” I heard Commander Will Matthews bellow.

I zombie-stumbled past him without acknowledgment and made my way farther into the bus. For the first time, I didn’t have any butterflies as I accepted the phone, any latent fear that I would somehow screw something up. Quite the opposite.

I was dying to talk to the son of a bitch.

FBI negotiator Martelli must have sensed my fury. He grabbed my wrist.

“Mike, you need to relax,” he said. “No matter what happened, stay calm. Unemotional. You go ballistic, we lose the rapport you’ve established. Thirty-two people are still in jeopardy.”

Unemotional! I thought. The worst part about it was that Martelli was absolutely right. My job was to be Mister Super Calm. It was like getting your nose broken and having to apologize for getting blood on your sucker-punching attacker’s fist. I was really starting to hate my current role.

I nodded to the com sergeant at the desk.

“Bennett,” I said.

“Mike,” Jack said merrily in my ear. “There you are. Listen, before you guys get all upset, I can explain. Father Stowaway must have been hitting the house wine pretty hard yesterday morning because we told everybody to leave. He jumped out at the wrong time and tried to run for it. With that black suit of his, we thought he was one of you SWAT guys trying to crash the party.”

“So you’re saying what? It was just an accident? Not really your fault?” I said, my grip threatening to pulverize the plastic cell phone.

“Exactly,” Jack said. “One of those wrong place-wrong time deals, Mike. Not that there’s any real big loss, if you think about it. Fudgepacker takes a dirt nap. Way I see it, there’s a lot of altar boys out there who’ll be sleeping a little easier tonight.”

That was it, I thought. Role or not, I was done listening to this monster.

“You son of a bitch,” I said. “You absolute piece of shit. You killed a priest.”

“Do my ears deceive me?” Jack yelled happily. “Or did I actually just hear a little real emotion. I was starting to think I was speaking with a voice-mail computer there, Mikey. All that psychotherapy, all that calming negotiating strategy crap you’ve been spouting almost made me want to eat my gun.
Finally! Let’s put it all out on the table, laddie
. We want the money and to get away, and you guys want to blow our heads off with high-powered rifles at your earliest convenience.”

Jack laughed easily.

“We’re not friends. If there ever were enemies on this earth, they’re me and you. And you’re right, Mike. We’re sons of bitches. In fact, we’re the evilest sons of bitches you ever had the misfortune to cross paths with. If we’re willing to kill a priest over nothing, how much more willing do you think I am to body-bag one of these worthless celebrities over seven figures?
Either kill us, or get us our money
. Just stop wasting my time!”

“You sure you don’t want to choose that other option?” I said suddenly.

“What option is that, Mikey?”

“Eating your gun,” I said.

“Fat chance,” Jack said with a laugh. “I’m not that hungry. But you keep messing around with me, you better watch out. Before this thing is over, I might just decide to feed it to you.”

A CONNECTION-CUTTING dial tone howled in my ear-just as Mike Nardy, the cathedral’s caretaker, entered the trailer.

“I’m afraid I have a confession to make,” he blurted, looking out over the assembly of cops and agents. “There
is
another way into the cathedral.”

The FBI HRT commander, Oakley, stepped forward to handle this himself.

“Tell us about it, Mr. Nardy,” he said.

The old man was seated in a swivel chair and handed a coffee.

“The reason I didn’t say anything before was, well, it’s kind of a secret. Kind of embarrassing for the church, too. The only reason I’m even here is that Father Miller, the priest who was just shot, was a friend of mine, and well, I have your word that it won’t get out? The passageway?”

“Of course,” Oakley said immediately. “Where’s the way in, Mr. Nardy?”

“From the Rockefeller Center concourse,” the caretaker said. “There’s a passage that cuts under Fifth into a, um, bomb shelter. Back in the sixties, Cardinal Spellman, God rest his soul, got quite, I guess the word is
paranoid
, after the Bay of Pigs incident. He was convinced New York was going to get nuked. So he allocated some funds for an undisclosed construction project.

“A bomb shelter was built off the archbishops’ crypt. With the Rockefellers’ permission, an alternate escape passage was dug to the lower concourse of Rockefeller Center, where they now have shops and such. I’ve never been through the passage; no one has since they built it.”

“Why didn’t you tell us this before?” I butted in angrily. “You knew we were looking for a way to get in, Nardy.”

“I thought things could be resolved peacefully,” the caretaker said quietly. “Now I know otherwise. Poor Father Miller. He was a good soul.”

One thing I loved was when citizens decided to manipulate the police for their own political reasons. I was about to tear into the old man for obstructing justice when Oakley cut me off with a shake of his head.

“Do you think you could show us the way in, Mr. Nardy?” Oakley said calmly.

“Absolutely,” the caretaker said.

Oakley called into his radio and ordered half of his commando team to the command center.

Finally some action, I thought. Finally a break for the good guys.

I was sick of talking, too. Just like Jack.

“Going somewhere?” Oakley said, eyeing me with surprise.

“With you,” I said with a tight smile. “You never know when you might need to negotiate.”

AFTER TWENTY MINUTES of weapon loading and intense strategy briefing, I joined a dozen joint task force FBI and NYPD commandos. We followed the caretaker, Nardy, into 630 Fifth Avenue.

I was all but swimming under a borrowed night-goggle headset, heavy vest, and tactical shotgun. Only the occasional creak of a combat boot could be heard as we moved quickly through the red marble chamber of the Art Deco lobby and down the stairs.

Commander Will Matthews had cleared the street concourse below at the beginning of the siege, and it was a little creepy as we trooped through the silent, deserted mall-like corridor. There were Christmas decorations and lights blinking through the plate glass of upscale clothing stores, toy shops, and a food court, but the aisles and the tables were empty.

It reminded me of an old horror movie my son Brian had made me watch with him the Halloween before about people running away from zombies in a mall. I quickly dispelled the déjà vu when I remembered the title.

Dawn of the Dead.

Nardy stopped at an unmarked steel door beside a Dean amp; DeLuca gourmet food store. He removed a prodigious ring of keys from the pocket of his rumpled slacks. His lips moved as he sorted through them, in prayer or counting, I wasn’t able to tell. He finally selected a large, strange-looking key from his ring and handed it to Oakley.

“That’s it,” he said, crossing himself. “God bless you.”

“Okay, everyone,” Oakley whispered. “Radios off and my team in front. Make sure the suppressors are screwed down tight. Have your night goggles ready for going in lights-out. Single file, space yourselves out. Listen for my signal.” He turned to me. “Mike, last chance to go back.”

“I’m all in,” I said.

THERE WERE METAL flicks of weapon safeties being released and then a slightly louder one as Oakley turned the lock.

The door made a loud creaking groan as it swung in. We stared over the barrels of our weapons into an unlit concrete-lined corridor.

“Mom always said if I played my cards right, I’d make it to Fifth Avenue,” Oakley whispered as he flipped down his night goggles and stepped into darkness behind his MP5.

When I turned down my goggles, the lightless tunnel went to an eerie lime green. Twenty feet in, we had to duck under a thick bank of rusting iron cable ducts. Another thirty feet after that, we passed along a teakettle-hot steam pipe that was as big as the side of a gasoline truck.

The grade of the tunnel took a sharp pitch downward, and we arrived at a long set of spiraling iron stairs also heading down.

“I always wondered what they spent the second collection on,” Oakley said as he descended. “Anybody who spots a dude with horns and a pitchfork has standing orders to squeeze until he hears a click.”

At the bottom of the two-story staircase was a riveted metal door with what looked like a steering wheel in its exact center. If I didn’t know better, I would have said we had somehow arrived at the engine room of a ship.

The door moved inward as if it were on oiled hinges when Oakley put his hand to it. Suddenly, we were in a small, odd concrete room. It was a church, with painful-looking concrete pews and a cement altar. The only thing not made of concrete was the crucifix that had been fashioned of a dull gray metal that might have been lead. To the right of the crucifix was an iron ladder heading up into a kind of chimney in the ceiling.

Oakley motioned for silence as we moved toward the ladder.

The vertical passage was about two stories high, like some strange silo built underground. I don’t know if they trained in ladder racing at the FBI, but if there was an Olympic event, the Hostage Rescue guys would have gotten the gold.

From the bottom of the ladder, I could make out another steering wheel opener at the roof of the chimney above the commandos’ heads.

Then I saw it spin with a screech.

A few seconds later, I couldn’t see anything because a circle of light burned down from above, and I was blinded-blind and then deaf as the world around me shattered with the crackle of gunfire.

Jack was onto us.

I REARED BACK from the chimney. I tore off my night-vision goggles. Bullets pocked holes in the concrete floor as gunfire rained down into the cramped slot.

It was a miracle I wasn’t hit as I pulled the jumping, falling, and sliding members of the retreating tactical team away from the kill-zone base of the ladder.

The blue-white flashes from the continuing gunfire pulsed like strobe lights as team members performed CPR on their fallen brothers.

I heard Oakley swearing and counting heads as I flicked my MP5 to auto and jogged back to the chimney.

Then I shoved the machine gun up into the hole beside the ladder, one-handed, and pulled the trigger. The MP5 jumped like a jackhammer in my hand until I heard a click. I didn’t know if I’d hit anything, but it seemed to momentarily stop the attack.

A second later, there was a loud, whistling clang, and a smoking canister landed at the base of the ladder. Then another. I pulled my Windbreaker up around my face as acrid smoke burned my eyes and lungs.

“Tear gas!” I shouted. “Fall back!”

I almost tripped on a fallen cop behind me. “Hit,” he said in a whisper. I lifted him up into a fireman’s carry and headed back for the door we’d come in through. I banged one of my shins on a stair of the spiral staircase and felt blood seep down into my boot.

I nearly brained myself, and the cop I was carrying, when I ran into one of the iron ducts near the tunnel entrance.

It was surreal back out in the corridor of the mall. Under the blinking red and green holiday lights and sappy Christmas Muzak, the blood and filth on our guys looked like makeup.

I laid the man I had carried out onto the polished marble floor of the concourse. Then I gasped as I stared into his lifeless blue eyes. He was a burly, black-haired NYPD ESU cop, no more than twenty-five.

Now he was dead, gone while I’d tried to carry him to safety.

Oakley was putting a helmet over the face of a fallen FBI commando to my left.

What had happened? Two good men, good cops. Down.

I looked around, stunned. There was an advertisement for a clothing store through the plate glass above the cop’s corpse. Some laughing teenage blonde in a Santa hat and red cat suit sandwiched between a couple of shirtless male models on the hood of a vintage car.

That absurd tableau, coupled with my shock, snapped something inside of me. A rattling burglar alarm went off as I shattered the store window into a million pieces with the butt of my MP5.

I slid down the wall into the puddle of green broken-glass diamonds. I bit my lip as I looked back at the black hellhole we’d just climbed out of.

God help us,
I thought. And then-
How do they know so much about St. Patrick’s? How do they know so much about us?

THE NEAT MAN folded his cell phone closed as an ambulance hopped the curb of 630 Fifth right in front of him. He had to take a step back and actually prop his back against the cold, filthy side of the crisis trailer in order to let out the female EMT from the front cab. He did a double take and then walked away with his head down.

If it isn’t I-need-a-hug Yolanda, he thought, stealing another glance at the side of the Hispanic paramedic’s face.

He shook his head, remembering her from outside the hospital where Caroline Hopkins had breathed her last.

Of all the sieges in all the cathedrals in all the world, she had to drive her meat wagon into mine.

The Neat Man smiled as he tilted his coffee at her.

Here’s looking at you, bitch. Six degrees of separation and all that crapola.

He watched her rush across the plaza, pushing a wheeled stretcher. The tactical team emerged from the revolving door just as she got to the entrance.

The Neat Man counted heads quickly. Thirteen had gone down. Now there were nine standing. His boys inside had taken care of business! Against Hostage Rescue, too! And Hostage Rescue was supposed to be the best of the best.

Thank God he’d been able to tip Jack off.

He winced a little when he saw asshole hotshot detective Mike Bennett was still among the living. Yolanda was pulling up his pant leg and wiping at a cut on his shin.

What happened, Mikey? Got a boo-boo?

He watched as Bennett shrugged her off and hobbled, shell-shocked, toward the trailer. Cops and FBI agents patted him on the shoulder as he passed.

“Not your fault,” the Neat Man called from the crowd at Bennett’s back as he passed. “It’s those bastards inside. This is all on them.”