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Chapter 89
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 ru
“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.
“Be
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 pla
Guess we’ll find out soon enough.
Chapter 90
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.
Chapter 91
“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 sca
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 begi