Worst Case

Chapter 81

IT WAS FULL-OUT bedlam on 25th Street in front of Mooney’s doorless town house. The bomb techs and black-clad Hostage Rescue Team agents were now joined by another thirty or so Manhattan Task Force uniforms, who had come to secure the crime scene.

Positioned center stage on the sidewalk behind the tape, Emily and I paced like expectant parents, calling everyone and anyone we could think of to track down Mooney.

We’d sent Schultz with a team to Inwood to Mooney’s mother’s apartment. Ramirez was over at his law firm, trying to shake some new leads loose, but so far he had come up with diddly.

Every few seconds, streaks of bubbling blue-and-red light from speeding PD radio cars would blow past on Ninth, their sirens whoop-whooping.

“The commissioner has put on the department’s entire day shift and activated the NYPD Anti-Terror Task Force Hercules team,” my boss, Carol Fleming, told me. “Cars and perso

I blew out a frustrated breath. They really had their work cut out for them, considering that Manhattan was actually one large population cluster.

“The commissioner also wants to know yesterday how the hell Mooney got his hands on British military plastic explosive,” I was told.

“I’ll be sure to ask him after I read him his rights,” I told my boss before I hung up.

“Yeah, his last rites,” mumbled Emily, who seemed even more pissed than me.

I glanced at her and came close to chuckling. I remembered way back, three days before, when Parker was a rube Fibbie. Now she was starting to sound like me.

“New York-style bitterness and sarcasm,” I said. “You’re starting to impress me, Agent Parker.”

Both ends of the narrow cross street in the heart of Chelsea were cordoned off now, but of course, more and more people kept arriving by the minute to get a gander. It looked like a street fair near the barricaded bodega on the corner of Ninth. Rent cast member look-alikes were hanging out their windows across the street, standing on their fire escapes with binoculars, gaping down from the roofs. Hadn’t they heard about the possibility of explosives? Guess not.

I hadn’t even had time to put my phone away when my boss called me back.

“Mike, this is-oh, God-something new. Get a Wi-Fi co

“School what?!” I yelled.

Without hanging up, I raced Emily into the back of the FBI truck and found a laptop. I clicked on Internet Explorer and brought up the website.

I opened up the link.

“Tell me that’s a hoax,” Emily pleaded as she looked over my shoulder.

It wasn’t. My breath left me.

It was a still photo of Mooney. He was standing on a gym stage, holding a megaphone in one hand and a gun in the other. The gun was pressed to the head of another man-a teacher?-in a suit. In front of him were hundreds of male high school students wearing private school blazers.

Staring at the man and the terrified children in front of him, I felt an almost out-of-body anger. This was it. Mooney’s last stand. I noticed a large bag beside him. The bomb tech told me that a pound of the PE-4 could blow up a truck. I didn’t even want to think about what nineteen pounds of it could do to all those kids.

“Came in five minutes ago. It’s real,” my boss said.

“What school is it?” I cried.

“We’ve had three calls into nine-one-one in the past ten minutes from mothers whose kids go to St. Edward’s Academy on the Upper East Side. Kids have been texting that a man with a gun just came into their school gym during a pep rally.”

My head dropped until it was practically between my knees. Now Mooney had taken over a school full of children. This was our absolute worst nightmare come true.

“What school?” Emily said.

She jumped back as I punched the side of the truck.

“St. Edward’s. It’s an all-boys private prep school off Park Avenue. The richest schoolkids in the city.”

“We have radio cars arriving on scene right now,” my boss said. “Get up there!”

Chapter 82

IT WAS ONE long yellow blur of taxis outside the windshield as we zipped up Park Avenue. Uniformed doormen and pedestrians stood frozen under the sidewalk awnings, staring after us fearfully. I don’t know which was louder, our siren or the static from the FBI radio as its frequency was flooded with citywide emergency calls.

We skidded to a stop by the armada of blacked-out Chevy Suburbans that had taken up position across East 81st Street.

The SUVs belonged to the NYPD’s intimidating Anti-Terror Hercules Squad. The Special Forces-like team of cops was positioned behind mailboxes and parked cars, aiming their M4 assault rifles at an imposing Gothic-style school building halfway down the block.

A Bentley Continental shrieked to a stop beside us. A sleek silver-haired man in pinstripes and silk suspenders jumped out, leaving the door open. A uniformed cop stiff-armed him as he tried to push over an NYPD sawhorse.

“Let me go. My son’s a St. Edward’s student. He’s in there!” he yelled, tussling with the officer.

I noticed that a rail-thin woman in Jackie O shades was already at the opposite corner, standing beside a Range Rover Westminster with a uniformed chauffeur. A diamond-encrusted hand covered her mouth.

“Please,” she said with a Russian accent to the closest officer. “His name is Terrence Osipov. Please, where is he? He’s in the seventh grade.”

“How exclusive is this school again?” Emily said, doing a double-take at the woman’s gems.

“You kidding me?” I said. “Kindergarten at St. Edward’s is thirty K according to the latest New York magazine. Not only is it practically as expensive as Harvard, it’s harder to get into.”

I found a youthful black precinct captain directing cops underneath an apartment house awning on the north side of the street.

“We spoke to the security guard,” the young chief said. “He said the kook came in about half an hour ago to go to the Admissions office. Apparently he’s got a gun, and he’s locked himself inside the gym with the students. There was some kind of pep rally going on. The entire school is in there.”

“First thing we need to do is evacuate the block,” Tim Curtin, the bomb tech, said, arriving behind me. “He sets off that plastic in the right place, the gas lines could go.”

HRT chief Tom Chow looked at the building through binoculars as the thump of a just-arriving NYPD Bell chopper appeared in the slot of sky above the street’s limestone co-ops.

“We need to do this textbook,” he said. “Block off all routes of escape. Take up shooting positions on the surrounding buildings. Approach in a protected vehicle with a barricade phone. Toss it in and start negotiations. We’ll need the building plans.”

“Sounds good,” Emily yelled over the reverberating rotor wash of the helicopter. “Except Mooney’s been flawlessly cold-blooded up to this point. I can’t believe for a second he wants to negotiate a damn thing.”

A female cop came over with an ashen-faced woman in her seventies.

“Cap,” the officer said. “This is the school secretary. She saw the guy who’s holding the kids.”

“He killed Coach Webb,” she blurted between hysterical sobs. “He shot Coach Webb in the face.”

That was it. That sealed it. He’d already started shooting. All-too-familiar gory school-shooting news footage flashed through my mind. No way. No goddamn way.

Without further deliberation, I decided on a course of action.

I started sprinting for the arched entrance of St. Edward’s.