Step on a Crack (19 page)

ACROSS THE AISLE from Eugena, Charlie Conlan checked his watch, then checked it again. He looked up as the skinny hijacker who liked Mercedes Freer came strolling past, doing his rounds.

Conlan turned and saw a lone hijacker sitting on the rear rail. He watched as the punk put his shotgun in his lap and took something out of the pocket of his robe. It was a jeweled cell phone he’d grabbed from one of the celebrities. Was he making a call? Who would he be calling now?

No,
Conlan realized as the hijacker stared at the screen and started pressing buttons with his thumbs. He was playing a video game.

Conlan coughed twice. His signal. Todd Snow at the front pew sat up and shot him a look. Conlan nodded as Mercedes, sitting at the end of one of the middle pews, tugged the passing hijacker’s robe.

Let’s roll.

When the hijacker turned, Snow bolted over the front pew, hopped silently over the rail, and disappeared under the skirt of the altar.

Conlan swiveled his head to see if the hijacker at the rear had noticed. Nope, still into his game.

Conlan could hear Mercedes chatting up the other punk.

“I’m going a little crazy,” Mercedes hissed. “C’mon, you and me. I’m serious. Give me a kiss at least.”

The hijacker’s Adam’s apple bulged. He glanced back at his partner, then leaned down and started tongue kissing the pop singer through his mask. His hands were all over her chest.

“Not here in front of everybody. Behind the altar,” Mercedes whispered breathlessly.

The hijacker squinted back at his partner.

“What? I’m not worth it?” Mercedes said. She walked her fingers down the gunman’s robe. Stopped right above his crotch. “Believe me, I’m
worth
it.”

“Behind the altar?” he said. “You’re even dirtier than your videos. All right, let’s go.”

Conlan exhaled as Mercedes rose in her pew. This was it.

Two things would happen now. Snow would stomp the hijacker behind the altar, and Conlan would rush the gunman at the back rail. Then they would have two guns, and maybe they’d have a chance to get out of this alive.

Charlie Conlan wiped the sweat from his palms. He knew how risky this was. But it was either fight or wait to be shot like Rooney.

He glanced up at the altar again. Mercedes and the hijacker were glued together as they hurried up the steps.

Now.

Conlan stood in his pew. Suddenly there was an unexpected explosion. What felt like a steel fist slammed into the small of his back.

There was another explosion, and an iron blow caught him in the chin. Without knowing how it had happened, he was down on his back, numb and bleeding, struggling to stay conscious.

He heard Todd Snow yell out. Snow had been rushing toward the gangly hijacker when three others suddenly appeared. They fired on him-rubber bullets!

Conlan watched, horrified, as the quarterback dropped. Then Little John walked out from the larger church. He stepped up to Snow.

“You thought you could take us?
You? That old man
?” Little John said as he put his boot on Snow’s chest.

Slowly, almost ceremoniously, he took a rubber bullet gun from one of his colleagues. He placed its bore between the athlete’s eyes. Then he seemed to reconsider. Instead, he placed the muzzle on the star’s right hand, his throwing hand. He stepped on the wrist to hold it still.

“Interference,” Little John yelled in a canned ref’s voice. “Ten yards. First down. And I’m placing you on the permanent DL.”

The pop of the gun firing was swallowed by Snow’s scream.

Conlan looked on as Mercedes Freer walked up to Little John. What the hell was she doing now?

He watched as she was handed a cell phone. Then a cigarette. He realized what had happened as Little John chivalrously lit it for her.

“You sold us out,” Conlan croaked. “You insane little bitch.”

Mercedes rolled her eyes at Conlan.

“Merry Christmas, Momma,” Conlan heard her say into the cell phone as the numbness in his face started to warm. “Stop cryin’,” he heard her say. “It’s okay. These boys aren’t so bad. They’ll let me go, don’t you worry about it. One thing you taught Mercedes is how to take care of herself.”

WITH THE ABSENCE of traffic on Christmas morning, I got back to St. Patrick’s in near record time. Even the pedestrian and media crowd had thinned out considerably, but I had a feeling that after they finished opening their presents, they’d be back for their fill of blood sport.

As I was coming across the plaza of 630 Fifth, a red-suited Santa walked past with a tray of coffee and a submachine gun strapped across his back. It was Steve Reno.

“Where you delivering presents, Santa? Fallujah?” I said.

“Trying to keep up morale, Mike,” Reno said through his cotton-ball beard.

“You have a harder job than me,” I said.

Paul Martelli almost tackled me as I got off the elevator at the command center.

“We did it, Mike,” he said. “Five minutes ago, we got the last of it. All the money. It’s ready to go.”

“Any chance we’ll be able to trace it?” I asked.

Martelli shrugged his shoulders. “We know it’s set to go to an account in the Caymans. They will wire it somewhere else immediately, then somewhere else. Eventually, we could probably put enough political pressure on the bank down there to tell us where it was sent, but by then it will probably have been shot to another numbered account in Switzerland or who the hell knows where. The white-collar crime guys are working on it. If we are able to trace it, it’s going to take some time.”

Well, at least we had gotten the money together, I thought. That was something.

I turned as Commander Will Matthews came out of the boardroom. I winced at his stubbled cheeks, the red-rimmed eyes. All he’d gotten this Christmas was an ulcer.

“We ready to go?” Will Matthews said to Ned Mason.

Mason stood up, cupping a phone receiver, and said, “Bank’s just waiting on you to give the final word.” Mason looked eager to get this over with, too. He hadn’t been much help, but at least he had stayed around to observe.

Will Matthews took off his five-point cap and clawed a hand through his flattop before he took the receiver.

“This is Borough Commander Will Matthews,” he said. “I hate like hell to say this. Wire the money.”

I followed my boss back into the boardroom and stood with him as he silently gazed at the cathedral.

Finally, he turned to me.

“You get those bastards on the phone one more time, Mike. Tell them they got their blood money. Now let these poor people go.”

“How do you think they’re going to try to get away, Commander?” I finally said.

“Let’s just see, Bennett,” Will Matthews said, gazing malevolently across Fifth Avenue. “The suspense is killing me.”

I WENT BACK OUT to the communications desk in the outer office. The sergeant, who had been the lead tech guy since this thing began, nodded at me with anticipation. “What’s up, Mike? What now?”

“Can you ring me into the cathedral?” I said.

The sergeant blinked repeatedly, then nodded. He stood immediately, swept the paper off his desk, and flipped open a laptop.

“Give me a minute,” he said, which was about all it took.

“Yello,” Jack said as the sergeant handed me a phone.

“It’s Mike,” I said. “The money’s been wired.”

“All of it?” Jack said.

“All of it. You got what you wanted.”

“Let me see about that,” Jack said skeptically.

I could hear some key clicks in the background. They were checking up on the account from inside the cathedral. Wasn’t the Internet just the best?

“Mikey, me boyo. What a wonderful gift,” Jack finally said after a minute. “I’m about to explode with Christmas joy.”

“We fulfilled our part of the bargain,” I said, ignoring yet another of his wiseass comments. “We’ve done exactly what you wanted. Now you have to do your part. It’s time to let the hostages go.”

“All in due time, Mike,” Jack said calmly. “All in due time. The hostages will be released all right, but on our terms. What would be the point of getting shot like dogs after all this good work? You know what I’m saying? Here’s what we’re going to need. You got a pen?”

“Tell me,” I said.

“Okay. Here goes. In twenty minutes, I want eleven identical black sedans with dark tinted windows, gassed and ready, parked out front at the Fifth Avenue entrance. The doors will be left
open
, and the engines left
running
. Fifth Avenue will be cleared all the way to One thirty-eighth, and Fifty-seventh will be cleared river to river. It goes without saying that any effort to stop and detain us will result in a vast amount of death. If all our demands are met, the remaining hostages will be released unharmed.”

“Anything else?” I said.

“Nope, that’s it,” Jack said. “
Arrivederci
, Mikey. It’s been a real hoot.”

I almost couldn’t believe it when I heard a dial tone in my ear. That was it?

All they wanted was eleven cars? Where did they think they were going to drive? Mexico?

Behind me, I heard the borough commander speaking into his radio, telling the task force cops to clear Fifth and 57th and to block the side streets off. He got on another radio and told all the rooftop snipers to get ready.

“When they come out, we’ll take them down,” he said. “Anyone who has a clear line of sight has a green light.”

“Roger that,” came back one of the Delta Force guys.

“Oh, and I want GPS on those sedans,” Will Matthews told one of his captains.

“Bennett,” Will Matthews told me, “get up on the roof and into a helicopter, in case we have to pursue.”

Not exactly overjoyed about heights, I can’t say I was extremely psyched about that task, but I nodded okay.

As I stepped into the elevator headed to the roof, I couldn’t imagine how the hijackers were planning on getting five steps out of the cathedral without getting massacred. I hit the button for the top floor.

Guess we’ll find out soon enough.

I DON’T KNOW how gung ho I would have been to climb into a helicopter that was
on the ground
, never mind fifty-one stories up. If I wasn’t so pressed for time, I would have crawled to the open doors to avoid the low, heavy chop of rotors.

The pilot must have noticed the green tinge of my face, or had a healthy sadistic streak. The second I was strapped in, the aircraft dropped off the side of the building, express elevator down, leaving my stomach back on the fifty-first floor.

After we slowed and stopped to hover four hundred feet over the intersection of 50th and Fifth, and I was done congratulating myself on not throwing up, I took in the whole of the cathedral for the first time.

It really was a beautiful structure, its spires and ornamentation as delicate and intricate as a wedding cake’s, which was mind-boggling, considering the whole thing was made out of stone. Instead of being dwarfed by the Midtown glass office monoliths it was surrounded by, it seemed to shame them and somehow make it seem like the skyscrapers were out of place.

As I looked down, eleven black Chevy sedans rolled slowly in from the north. They stopped in front of the cathedral, and the uniformed cops driving them jumped out, leaving the doors open.

Squad cars were parked at every intersection to the southern horizon up Fifth, their cherry tops flashing as they blocked the side streets on both sides.

What a scene.

“Doors!” someone called over the police-band crackle.

Down below, the tall front doors of the church began slowly opening.

A figure in a head-to-toe brown hooded robe and ski mask stepped out and stopped beside the stair railing.

I stared at the lone figure, waiting for just about anything to happen next.

Despite the fact that I was one of an army of cops, I was strangely anxious. One thing these sick puppies had taught us was that they were capable of anything, at any time.

There was a frenzied spattering of police radio chatter from my headset as another subject, dressed in the same brown robe and ski mask, stepped out a moment later. Was it the hijackers? What the hell was going on?

I twisted toward a flash of movement by the church doors.

A second later, my jaw dropped harder than the helicopter had off the roof.

Spilling out of the cathedral, walking in two straight lines down toward the waiting sedans, was a group of twenty-odd people.

All
dressed in brown robes.

All
wearing ski masks.

There was no way to tell the hostages from the bad guys.

“DOES ANYBODY have a shot?” Will Matthews cried out over the radio.

There were maybe thirty figures in brown robes out in front of the bronze doors of the cathedral now. They were moving slowly down the steps toward the waiting sedans.

“
Hold
!” called a voice. “We’re scanning with radar for concealed weapons.”

On the roof of Saks, a sniper set down his rifle and raised what looked like an extra-long pair of binoculars. He lowered the binoculars finally and called into his sleeve.

“Stand down,” he said. “We have no shot. Heat signatures indicate that
they all seem to have weapons on them
. We have no safe shot. We can’t tell who is who.”

My earphones almost fell off as I shook my head. Jack and his hijackers had done it again. They’d anticipated how dangerous it was for them to get from the church to the cars. They’d anticipated our next move and somehow disguised everyone. Our snipers didn’t have a shot.

Down below, the brown-robed mass of people was climbing into the cars, three and four per car. After a moment, the tinted-windowed doors started to close one by one. That was that. Another golden opportunity lost, or taken away from us. The bad guys could be the drivers in each car-or they could be in the backseat, holding a gun on a hostage in the driver’s seat. There was no way to know.

I noticed for the first time that from the windows of the buildings on both sides of Fifth, citizens and media people were watching, transfixed. From where I was, it almost looked like a ticker-tape parade, only with celebrity hostages instead of sports or war heroes.

I stared at the idling cars. The big question remained: How did the hijackers think they were getting off the island of Manhattan? With the strange way that things were winding down, I was beginning to believe that nothing short of a bloodbath would resolve this.

It wasn’t just airsickness that made my stomach roll a few seconds later.

“Goddamnit to hell!” I heard Will Matthews cry over the radio. “Bennett, don’t lose them!”

When I glanced at the pilot beside me, I noticed that it was a woman beneath the aviator sunglasses and helmet. I knew I was in for it the second I saw her cocky smirk.

“What are you waiting for?” I said, and we fell.