“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!”
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.
Chapter 83
“MIKE! WAIT! WHAT the hell are you doing?” Emily called behind me.
“I’m going to end this,” I yelled over my shoulder as I cleared my gun. “One way or another. Right now.”
Glock firmly in hand, I burst through the school’s front door in a combat crouch. My overtaxed heart felt like it was about to burst as well when the door rattled shut behind me.
In the glass trophy case beside me were spooky sepia photographs of smiling St. Edward’s students from the turn of the century. I took a deep breath and bit my lip as I peered down the long, even spookier empty corridor in front of me.
“Not so fast, Bennett,” Emily whispered, coming in behind me.
Even better, the eight members of the Hostage Rescue Team were right behind her.
“Stay stacked and watch those corners,” Chow whispered into his tactical mic as they cut ahead. “Off the wall, Jennings bullets tend to ricochet, remember? Guns and eyeballs, people. Make me look bad, and I’ll kick your tail.”
The obsessively trained commandos began making sure the classrooms were empty. Fast crossing thresholds, they kept low so as not to silhouette themselves from inside.
We found the body of Coach Webb in the Admissions office three minutes later. He’d been shot once in the head. A mix of fury and sadness sizzled through me as I stared down at the cross-shaped wound in his skull. Almost like ashes, I thought.
I was looking at Mooney’s twisted version of Ash Wednesday.
We were coming back out into the hall when a loud thundering sound started. The door at the other end of the corridor flew open wide. I swallowed and sucked breath at the same time.
“Hold your fire!” I yelled.
It was the kids. Students in navy blazers, hundreds of them, were running toward us out of the gym, obviously in a panic. Many of them were crying as they rushed down the hall at full speed.
I scanned the crowd for Mooney, for explosives or a gun. He wasn’t there. What now? And what the hell? He was letting them go?
We directed the kids toward the front entrance and radioed outside that they were coming out. When the last one made it to the front foyer, we continued down the hallway, running now for the gym.
“Freeze!” Chow yelled to a shocked-looking man coming around the stands.
“Please! I’m the headmaster. Henry Joyce,” the distraught bald man said. “He’s taken two of the students. Jeremy Mason and Aidan Parrish. He called them out and handcuffed them together before telling everyone to run. There was nothing I could do… Oh, God!”
He pointed to a door at the opposite side of the basketball court.
“I think he took them into the basement.”
ON THE OTHER side of the gym’s parquet, I hit the basement door at a full-court sprint. I was only half a step ahead of Emily. The HRT guys were at our backs as we went down the cement stairs two by two.
The basement was dark and stifling and smelled like chlorine. Would he try to kill the two boys down here before we got to him? Had he already? A boiler roared as we passed some industrial equipment for the school’s pool.
I saw a slanting ray of daylight as we turned a corner. It was coming down from an open cellar grate in the ceiling. I jumped up a short steel ladder that headed up the hatch and poked my Glock out. When I didn’t get shot, I stuck my head out.
Goddammit! There was a short Dumpster-filled alley to my right. The alley had a steel gate at its end. An open steel gate, which led out onto 80th Street at the back end of the blockwide school campus.
From around the corner came a yell and a squeal of tires.
“Shit! C’mon!” I yelled to Emily as I climbed out onto the cracked cement.
A shocked-looking Filipino taxi driver wearing a white Kangol hat was standing in the street with a cell phone to his ear. A group of construction workers behind him were pointing east toward Lexington Avenue.
“He just turned right onto Lex,” the cabbie said as he saw the badge around my neck. “Some crazy son of a bitch just jacked my taxi.”
“Were there kids with him?” I yelled as I ran past.
“Two of them,” the Filipino said. “They were handcuffed together. What the hell just happened?”
I wish I knew, I thought as I booked down the middle of the street.
I turned the corner and stood for a moment, dazed and staring. Lexington Avenue was filled with trucks, buses, cars, and taxis.
Dozens and dozens of taxis were flowing south into the distance by the second. None of them seemed to be speeding or acting erratically. There was no way to tell which one was Mooney’s!
