Maureen and Baxter stayed silent. Hickey went on, “It may interest you to know that the plan of this attack was sold to us at a low price, and the plan doesn’t provide much for your rescue or the saving of this Cathedral.”
Baxter said, “As long as it provides for your death, it’s a fine plan.”
Hickey turned to Baxter. “You’re a vindictive bastard. I’ll bet you’d like to bash in another young Irishman’s throat, now you’ve got the hang of it and the taste for it.”
“You’re the most evil, twisted man I’ve ever met.” Baxter’s voice was barely under control.
Hickey winked at him. “Now you’re talking.” He turned his attention to Maureen. “Don’t let Megan or Leary shoot you, lass. Take cover between these pews and lie still in the dark. Very still. Here’s your watch back, my love. Look at it as the bullets are whistling over your head. Keep checking it as you stare up at the ceiling. Sometime between 6:03 and 6:04 you’ll hear a noise, and the floor will bounce ever so slightly beneath your lovely rump, and the columns will start to tremble. Out of the darkness, way up there, you will see great sections of ceiling falling toward you, end over end, as in slow motion, right onto your pretty face. And remember, lass, your last thoughts while you’re being crushed to death should be of Brian—or Harry … any man will do, I suppose.” He laughed as he turned away and walked toward the bronze plate on the floor. He bent over and lifted the plate.
Maureen called after him: “My last thought will be that God should have mercy on all our souls … and that your soul, John Hickey, should finally rest in peace.”
Hickey threw her a kiss, then dropped down the ladder, drawing the bronze plate closed over him.
Maureen sat back on the pew. Baxter stood a moment, then moved toward her. She looked up at him and put out her hand. Baxter took it and sat close beside her so that their bodies touched. He looked around at the flickering shadows. “I tried to picture how this would end … but
“Nothing is ever as you expect it to be…. I never expected you to be …”
Baxter held her more tightly. “I’m frightened.”
“Me too.” She thought a moment, then smiled. “But we made it, you know. We never gave them an inch.”
He smiled in return. “No, we never did, did we?”
Flynn peered into the darkness to his right and stared at the empty throne, then looked out through the carved wooden screen to where the chancel organ keyboard stood on its platform beside the sanctuary. A candle was lit on the organ console, and for a moment he thought John Hickey was sitting at the keys. He blinked, and an involuntary noise rose in his throat. Pedar Fitzgerald sat at the organ, his hands poised over the keys, his body upright but tilted slightly back. His face was raised toward the ceiling as if he were about to burst into song. Flynn could make out the tracheal tube still protruding from his mouth, the white dead skin, and the open eyes that looked alive as the flame of the candle danced in them. “Hickey,” he said softly to himself, “Hickey, you unspeakable, filthy, obscene …” He glanced up into the choir loft but could not see Megan, and he concentrated again on the front doors.
5:20 came, then 5:25—
Flynn looked around the column to his rear and saw Maureen and Baxter huddled together. He watched them briefly, then turned back to the vestibule.
5:30.
A tension hung in the still, cold air of the Cathedral, a tension so palpable it could be heard in the steady beating chests, felt on the sweaty brows, tasted in the mouth as bile, seen in the dancing lights, and smelled in the stench of burning phosphorous.
5:35 came, and the thought began to take hold in the minds of the people in the Cathedral that it was already too late to mount an attack that would serve any purpose.
In the long southwest triforium George Sullivan put down his rifle and picked up his bagpipes. He tucked the bag under his arm, adjusted the three drone pipes over his shoulder, and put his fingers on the eight-holed chanter, and then put his mouth to the blowpipe. Against all orders and against all reason he began to play. The slow, haunting melody of “Amazing Grace” floated from the chanter and hummed from the drone pipes into the candlelit silence.
There was a very slight, almost imperceptible lessening of tension, a relaxing of vigilance, coupled with the most primitive of beliefs that if you anticipated something terrible, imagined it in the most minute detail, it would not happen.
Book V
Assault
Bellini stood at the open door of the small elevator in the basement below the Achbishop’s sacristy. An ESD man stood on the elevator roof and shone a handheld spotlight up the long shaft. The shaft began as brick, but at a level above the main floor it was wood-walled and seemed to continue up, as Stillway had pointed out, to a level that would bring it through the triforium’s attic.
Bellini called softly, “How’s it look?”
The ESD man replied, “We’ll see.” He took a tension clamp from a utility pouch, screwed it tightly to the elevator cable at hip level, and then stepped onto it and tested its holding strength. He screwed on another and stepped up to it. Step by step, very quickly now, he began working his way up the shaft to the triforium level eight stories above.
Bellini looked back into the curving corridor behind him. The First ESD Assault Squad stood silently, laden with equipment and armed with silenced pistols and rifles that were fitted with infrared scopes.
On the floor just outside the elevator a communications man sat in front of a small field-phone switchboard that was connected by wire to the remaining ESD Assault Squads and to the state office in Rockefeller Center. Bellini said to the man, “When the shit hits the fan, intersquad communication takes priority over His Honor and the Commissioner…. In fact, I don’t want to hear from them unless it’s to tell us to pull out.”
The commo man nodded.
Burke came down the corridor. His face was smeared with greasepaint, and he was screwing a big silencer onto the barrel of an automatic pistol.
Bellini watched him. “This don’t look like Los Angeles, does it, Burke?”
Burke stuck the automatic in his belt. “Let’s go, Bellini.”
Bellini shrugged. He climbed the stepladder and stood on the roof of the elevator, and Burke came up beside him in the narrow shaft. Bellini shone his light up the wall until it rested on the oak door that opened on the Archbishop’s sacristy twenty feet above. He said to Burke in a quiet voice, “If there’s a Fenian standing there with a submachine gun and he hears us climbing, there’ll be a waterfall of blood and bodies dropping back on this elevator.”
Burke shifted Bellini’s light farther up and picked out the dim outline of the climbing man, now about one hundred feet up the shaft. “Or there may be an ambush waiting up there at the top.”
Bellini nodded. “Looked good on paper.” He shut off his light. “You got about one minute to stop being all asshole and get out of here.”
“Okay.”
Bellini glanced up at the dark shaft. “I wonder … I wonder if that door or any door in this place is mined?” Bellini was speaking nervously now. “Remember in the army … all the phony minefield signs? All the other bullshit psy-warfare … ?” He shook his head. “After the first shot everything is okay … it’s all the shit before…. Flynn’s got me psyched out…. He understands … I’m sure he’s crazier than me. …”
Burke said, “Maybe Schroeder told him how crazy you really are … maybe Flynn’s scared of
Bellini nodded. “Yeah …” He laughed, then his face hardened. “You know something? I
