Step on a Crack (9 page)

TEN MINUTES LATER, we were outside in the frosty air, staring up at the magnificent church. As we stepped around the side of one of the dump trucks, Oakley spoke into his hands-free radio and ordered his snipers to get an angle on the irreplaceable windows of the Lady Chapel.

The gray light cast shadows into the church’s second-story windows and its arched entryway. The front of the cathedral resembled a large face, I thought: wide, dark eyes and a very large mouth, gaping open as if in outrage and shock.

I stopped dead still and almost went for my Glock again when the bells started sounding. I thought it was another move by the hijackers-until I glanced at my watch and saw that it was twelve.

The bells, set on some timer no doubt, were sounding out the Angelus, reminding the bustling heathens of Midtown to pray for some specific devotion I couldn’t remember. If failing to induce a communal saying of the Rosary, the tolling of the bells at least silenced the crowd of cops and press and onlookers.

Each long peal rang out loudly and forebodingly off the surrounding skyscrapers’ stone and aluminum and glass.

I scanned the crowd as an idea occurred to me.

I spotted the caretaker, Nardy, talking to a young woman across the 50th Street barricade.

“Mr. Nardy, where are the bells located?” I said as I jogged up to him, interrupting his conversation with the woman.

He stared at me before answering. “In the north spire,” he said with a grimace.

I looked at the ornate thirty-story cone of stone. About a hundred feet up, I noticed green slats that seemed like faded copper shutters.

“Is there access to the bells from inside?” I asked Nardy.

The caretaker nodded. “There’s an old winding set of wooden maintenance stairs from a time when the bells were rung by hand.”

It seemed risky, but if we could get up there somehow-maybe we could quietly pry loose some of the copper slats and get in.

“Can the inside of the north spire be seen from down in the church?” I asked.

“Why?” asked the woman Nardy had been talking to. “Do you plan to blow it up, too? Detective…?”

I NOTICED the
New York Times
press pass on the lapel of her cloth coat for the first time. So much for my keen detectively powers of observation.

“Bennett,” I said.

“Bennett, yes. You’re Manhattan North, right? I’ve heard of you. How’s Will Matthews doing?”

Like most cops, I couldn’t quite buy the whole “the people have a right to know” argument the press likes to toss around. I might, if all that journalistic nobility didn’t have a price tag attached to it. They
sold
newspapers last time I checked.

I gave the young newsie my best pissed-off cop face. Though it was easily as fierce as Commander Will Matthews’s, she didn’t seem fazed by it in the least, the little snot.

“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” I finally said.

“I would. But he has caller ID. So, what’s the story, Detective? Does nobody know nuttin’?” she said, her cultured voice dropping into passable New Yorkese. “Or is nobody tawkin’?”

“Why don’t you choose the answer you like the most,” I advised, turning away.

“Hmmm. Speaking of choices, I wonder if my editor will like biggest security blunder in world history for the headline? Or maybe nypd drops ball then stonewalls?” the
Times
reporter said. “That’s kinda catchy. What do you think, Detective Bennett? Too
New York
Post
?”

I winced, remembering what Will Matthews had said. He wouldn’t like it if I were the one to single-handedly bring more bad press for the NYPD.

“Listen, Ms. Calvin,” I said, turning. “Let’s not get off on the wrong foot here. I’ll talk to you, of course, but strictly off the record. Agreed?”

The reporter nodded quickly.

“You basically know as much as we do at this point. We’re in contact with the kidnappers, but they have yet to give us their demands. As soon as we know, and I get permission, I’ll give you all the information I can, all right? But we are in crisis mode right now. If the psychos inside have a radio or a TV and get tipped off about what we’re going to do, then people will die. Very important people.”

When I turned, I saw Ned Mason waving frantically at me from the door of the trailer.

“We all have to come together on this,” I yelled over my shoulder as I began to run.

MASON HANDED ME the ringing cell phone just as I made it to the doorway.

“Mike here,” I said.

“Mike. Hey, buddy,” Jack said. “What’s up with letting the phone keep ringing like that? You falling asleep on me? If I didn’t know what a sweet guy you were, I might get the impression you were busy plotting against me or something.”

“Thanks for releasing the president,” I said sincerely.

“Ah, don’t mention it,” Jack said. “It was the least I could do. Say, listen, the reason I’m calling is, I’ve got those demands together, and I was thinking of maybe e-mailing them to you. That all right? I’m usually a snail-mail kind of guy, to tell you the truth, but you know how much of a zoo the post office is around the holidays.”

The pseudocasual way Jack was speaking to me was starting to grate on my nerves. My negotiation training was mostly based on calming dangerous people who were actually distraught, people who had snapped, had gone over the edge.

But Jack was nothing but a cocky wiseass… killer?

In the parlance of the NYPD, with apologies to mixed-breed dogs, criminals-human beings who have forgone their humanity-are referred to as “mutts.” As I stood there with the phone in my hand, I reminded myself that’s all Jack was. A smart mutt, a sophisticated mutt maybe, but a mutt all the same.

I checked my anger by visualizing cuffing him, dragging him by the scruff of his neck past the people he was terrorizing. It was going to happen, I knew. Just a matter of time, I thought as I was handed an e-mail address by a tech cop.

“All right, Jack,” I said. “Here’s our address.”

“Okay,” Jack said after I gave him the specifics on the NYPD Web site. “We’ll send the stuff over in a minute or two. I’ll give you a little while to absorb things and then call you back. How does that sound?”

“Sounds good,” I said.

“Oh, and Mike?” Jack said.

“What’s that?” I said.

“I’m really appreciating all the cooperation. We all do. Things keep running this smooth, it’s going to turn out to be a real holly, jolly Christmas,” Jack said, and hung up.

“HERE IT IS,” one of the youngish cops in front of a laptop at the back of the trailer called in a high-pitched choirboy’s voice, “the demands are coming in.”

I raced to the rear.

Then I couldn’t believe what I was seeing as I looked at the screen. I was expecting a number, but what appeared looked like a long, fairly sophisticated spreadsheet.

Down the left-hand margin were the full names of the thirty-three hostages.

Next to each name was a ransom between two and four million dollars followed by contacts: the names of the hostages’ lawyers, agents, business managers, spouses, and all of their respective phone numbers.

At the bottom of the sheet was a bank routing number and specific, very clear instructions on how to wire the money via the Internet into the account.

I absolutely couldn’t believe this bullshit. The hijackers, instead of negotiating with us directly, were going straight to the source-namely the wealthy hostages themselves.

ESU lieutenant Steve Reno cracked his knuckles loudly behind me. “First they take us out of action,” he said angrily. “Now they make us their errand boys.”

Steve was right. These hijackers were acting like we didn’t exist. They were acting the way a kidnapper in a concealed location would-not like ten to a dozen guys surrounded by a battalion of heavily armed law enforcement, NYPD, and FBI.

“Let’s get some people in here to start calling those numbers and get this thing organized,” Commander Will Matthews said. “And give that account number to the Bureau. See if maybe they can get a lead for us.”

I closed my eyes and tapped the cell phone against my head in order to jolt something loose. Nothing was coming, so I checked my watch. Mistake. Only four hours had passed. Based on how completely exhausted I felt, I would have guessed it was four weeks.

Somebody handed me a coffee. There were cartoon reindeer and a smiling Santa on the paper cup. For a moment, I thought of how nice it would be when I finally got home. Christmas music playing softly as Maeve directed our ten elves in decorating the tree.

Then I remembered there was no tree.

And no Maeve.

I put the cup of coffee down and picked up one of the printouts of the demands, my fingers shaking slightly as they went down the list of contact numbers.

The great and glorious NYPD-acting as messengers.

JOHN ROONEY LIFTED his chin off his hands when something hard poked into his ribs. He glanced over and saw Little John, holding out his billy club.

“Hey, prima donna,” he said. “I’m getting bored. Time for you to get up on that altar and give us a little holiday entertainment. Whattaya say, guy?”

“I’m really not in the mood,” Rooney said, dropping his head back down.

Rooney’s teeth clicked together loudly when Little John gave him a love tap on the chin with the end of the club.

“Here’s your motivation,” Little John said. “Get up there and make me laugh like a hyena. Or I’ll shatter your Oscar-nominated skull open.”

My God, Rooney thought as he arrived up on the altar and stared out at the other hostages. Some of them were still crying. Just about every face was filled with wide-eyed terror.

Talk about a hard crowd to work. Plus, he hadn’t done stand-up since he’d broke into film eight years ago. And even then, all his jokes had been rehearsed ad nauseam in front of the bathroom mirror of his studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.

Little John, sitting in the back row, made a
c’mon
gesture with his baton.

What the hell could be funny about any of this? But what choice did he have?

“Hey, everybody,” Rooney tried. “Thanks for coming this morning. Heeere’s Johnny!”

He heard somebody, a woman, give a real laugh. Who was that? It was Eugena Humphrey. Good for her!

Then Rooney felt something in him flick like a circuit breaker.

“Eugena, hey, how YOU doin’, honey chile,” he said, mimicking the opening tagline from her morning show. She really started cracking up now, along with a few more people. Charlie Conlan was grinning broadly.

Rooney faked checking his watch.

“Talk about a long frickin’ Mass,” he said.

There were more laughs.

“You know what I really hate?” Rooney said, stalking back and forth now in front of the altar. “Don’t you just hate it when you go to a friend’s funeral and you get
kidnapped
?”

Rooney chuckled along with the cackles, maximizing the pause for effect. He was rolling pretty good now. He could feel it all through his nervous system.

“I mean, there you are, all dressed up, a little sad about the person gone-but a little happy that it’s not you, then wham! Wouldn’t you know it? The monks at the altar whip out sawed-off shotguns and grenades.”

Almost everybody was laughing now. Even a few of the hijackers in the back were cracking up. The laughter rolled like a wave off the stone walls.

Rooney started doing a Gregorian chant and then imitated whipping out a gun. He made a terrified face and ran and hid behind the altar. “Here, take my diamond earrings so I can jet,” he said, imitating Mercedes Freer to a tee. Then he rolled around on the marble floor, holding his face and whining like a hurt Chihuahua.

When he glanced at the crowd, he could see smiles everywhere. At least his routine was relaxing everyone a little. At the back of the chapel, he spotted Little John doubled over, holding his sides.

Keep laughing, asshole,
Rooney thought, getting up off his knees.
I got a million of ’em. Wait’ll you hear the one about the kidnapper getting the electric chair.

FROM THE BACK of the chapel, former rock-and-roller Charlie Conlan pretended to laugh at John Rooney’s shtick as he studied the hijackers one by one.

There were six of the jackals along the rear rail of the chapel. The big one, Little John, was there, but the leader, Jack, along with another five or six others, seemed to be away somewhere else in the church.

As the rest of the hostages continued to laugh at Rooney, Conlan did his best to recall some of his army training. He counted the grenades on the kidnappers’ chests, eyed the guns they carried, the batons, the bulge at the waist of their robes where bulletproof vests seemed to end.

He slid a couple of feet to the left in his pew, nothing too obvious, nothing to draw any attention.

“Todd,” he whispered.

“What’s up?” the New York Giants football star murmured near his ear.

“Is Brown with us?” The real estate tycoon was a big man, in his fifties, who looked to be in pretty good shape.

“He’s psyched,” the athlete said. “He talked to Rubenstein. Rubenstein’s going to try to get the mayor on board.”

Conlan was glad the quarterback was with them. Out of all of them, the six-four, two-hundred-thirty-pound athlete had the best shot at physically overpowering one of the hijackers.

“That’s progress,” Conlan said to Snow out of the corner of his mouth. “With Rooney, that makes at least five of us. The more, the better our chances.”

“What’s our move?” the quarterback asked.

“This is between me and you for now. You know how they frisked us? Took away our cell phones and wallets?” Conlan said.

He paused as Rooney told another joke.

“They missed the.twenty-two in my boot,” Conlan whispered.

There, he’d said it, he thought. He didn’t have a gun, but survival meant keeping up people’s spirits, keeping them hopeful and motivated to act when the time was right.

Conlan glanced up at the altar when he heard more applause. Rooney was taking a bow now. The show was over.

“We’ve got a shot,” the quarterback said through the clapping. “Say the word. We go. We roll.”