Worst Case

“Where is everybody?” he said as casually as he could.

“Sports pep rally in the auditorium. Baseball went to the Staties last season. Now, if only I could get my guys there.”

A pep rally. Would that complicate things? Probably. No time to do anything about it. He’d just have to improvise somehow.

Coach Webb patted Francis on the shoulder as they stopped before a door marked ADMISSIONS.

“Come visit me anytime, Francis. To jaw or maybe go a little one-on-one. See if that left of yours is still in operating order. Great seeing you, ma man.”

“You, too, Jerry. Thanks for everything,” Francis said with a grin.

Thanks for helping me set in motion the blackest day in St. Edward’s history, you conceited jock moron, he thought as he watched him walk away.

Chapter 77

IT TOOK HIM thirty seconds to backtrack down the hall to the main office. An old platinum-haired woman in a Harris tweed skirt suit was typing by herself behind the counter. A soft Muzak version of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco ” was coming from the radio beside her keyboard.

“Hello. May I help you?” the woman said in a highly polished voice. She was smiling as she turned, an attractive, bright-eyed woman in her early seventies. She lowered her bifocals.

Francis suddenly felt numb. It was one thing to do someone in a private place, to do someone in the dark, in secret. This was different, he realized. Beads of sweat stood on his hot forehead. Out here, under the blazing fluorescents with the Muzak playing, was very goddamned different.

Now! a voice in his head chided him.

Francis kicked the door shut behind him and breathed in loudly.

The woman was starting to stand when he leapt over the counter and grabbed her by her scratchy lapel. He fumbled the sheet from his pocket. On the printed sheet were photographs of two St. Edward’s students, along with their names. He didn’t know who was shaking more, her or him.

“D-di-did these children come to school today?” he stammered.

“What? Let go of me this instant! You can’t do this! Who are you?”

“Listen to me!” Francis yelled. He took the silenced Beretta from his waistband and put it to her head.

“Did these children come to school today?” he said again.

The old woman started to cry when she saw the gun.

“Please!” she shrieked as she tried to pull away. She’d closed her eyes and was really blubbering now. “No, please. Why do you want those students? Don’t hurt me! What are you doing?”

Damn it, Francis thought, shaking her. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

He turned at a soft rushing noise behind him. It was the door. Francis saw Coach Webb standing there, wide-eyed.

“What in the name of Holy God are you doing?” the coach said.

Francis let go of the woman. His mouth dropped open as he met his old teammate’s eyes. Caught. Holy shit. Caught.

His body and mind seemed to arrest simultaneously. He felt like his breath had been knocked out of him. The gun suddenly felt unbelievably heavy in his hand.

It was over. He was too weak. He knew it. He shouldn’t even be up on his feet at this point. Where was he now? Stage four? Deep stage four. He was a very sick man, a weak, dying old man. He should be in a hospital bed over at Sloan-Kettering.

“Put it down, Francis,” Coach Webb said. “Now, man.”

Can you still drive to your left like a banshee, ma man? Francis heard him say again. A quick memory flashed through Francis’s mind. Webb in the gym bathroom doorway, howling as he held the elastic of Francis’s torn tighty whiteys above his head.

He grabbed on to the pulse of hurt and rage that throbbed through him. It was like a second wind. Francis retightened his grip on the pistol. His resolve. He raised the gun.

“How about instead you get in here and close that fucking door, ma man,” he said. The coach looked like he was about to bolt down the hall, but then he shot a look over at Ms. Typing-to-the-Oldies and suddenly obeyed.

Webb was turning back from closing the door when Francis pulled the trigger. The bullet hit him right in his smug power-forward-all-city face. He fell back comically fast, as if he’d slipped on a banana peel. Swoosh! Nothing but net! Francis thought with a chuckle. What did they say at Knicks games again? Whoomp! There it is!

Francis felt amazingly focused as he turned back to the woman. It was as if someone had turned up the dimmer switch of his energy as far as it would go.

“Did those children come to school today?” he said again clearly and confidently, his best courtroom voice. He knocked her glasses away and placed the warm gun barrel on one of her squinted-shut eyelids.

“Yes,” she said.

The woman was weeping silently. Francis suddenly noticed that he was as well.

So much blood and still more to come, he thought. He nodded. It was worth it and then some.

“It was brave of you to try to protect the kids,” Francis whispered lovingly in the old lady’s ear. “But a higher purpose is waiting for them. That’s why I’m here. To deliver unto them the very highest purpose of all.”

Chapter 78

COUGHING IN THE flash-bang grenade smoke, I found a window in Mooney’s kitchen and threw it open.

“Goddang!” Emily rebel-yelled as she laid her pump shotgun on the granite kitchen island. “We missed his ass.”

“Damn it,” I said with disgust.

I loosened one of the Velcro straps on the heavy body armor and sat down next to her. Hostage Rescue had scoured every room on both floors, and there was nothing. No one was home. No Mooney. And even worse, no Dan Hastings.

After a quick call to my boss, I learned that Mooney still hadn’t shown up to work. Which was good in a way, since he just might be looking to kill everyone there. But if not at work, then where was he?

“Where should we toss first?” I said.

“Office,” she said.

We went up to the second floor and pooched through his office. And by pooched, I mean we tore it apart. In filing cabinets, we found trusts and estates folders, take-home work from his job probably. One of the walls was covered with photos of Francis at high-profile charity events. There were quite a few framed Vanity Fair and Avenue magazine pages. A business card in a side drawer said Mooney was something called a Philanthropy Consultant. To high-net-worth individuals, no doubt, by the gala events he was often photographed at.

One of the commandos called to us excitedly from downstairs.

“I think I found something, Em,” Chow said as we arrived in the basement. He pointed his gun-barrel-mounted flashlight at an open door. I reached in and flicked on the light switch.

I stood there, blinking, but not at the light. Against cement walls stood stack upon stack of newspapers and books. They were six feet high in some places. It looked like a pretty eclectic collection. There was a whole section of anti-Bush nonfiction. Well-thumbed tomes of Spinoza. A book called Quantum Geometry of Bosonic Strings sat on top of an autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. I spotted some French-language Rousseau and Alexis de Tocqueville volumes that had margin notes handwritten in French. There were many books by Jean-Paul Sartre and the modern French philosopher Michel Foucault.

“This guy might be a killer and a kook,” Emily said, “but at least he’s a well-read one.”

In a metal filing cabinet drawer we found a laptop. Emily pulled on surgical gloves before she turned it on. The laptop’s whole screen was filled with numbered Word documents.

Emily clicked on a random one. It was random, all right.

“‘They must be shown,’” she read. “‘Communication is futile. Like Malcolm X, I, too, am branded with the philosophy of any-means-necessary. I, too, am a free-willed, informed human being who has gifts that transcend the ordinary. I, too, have responsibilities that transcend the ordinary. I, too, have-’”