Step on a Crack (Michael Bennett 1)

How the hell were we expected to go on with this?

I remembered how my kids had worshipped Rooney. Maybe they were watching the live-action DVD he’d been in only last Christmas—Rudolph—right now.

Who would be next? I thought. Eugena? Charlie Conlan? Todd Snow?

Rooney had millions of fans, many of them children. Being such a star, he’d become part of the country and the world’s consciousness, and those bastards had just erased him and all the warm feelings he’d miraculously been able to generate.

I glanced back again at the cathedral, the crowd stretching beyond it, the microwave towers of the news vans.

For the first time, I wanted to pack it in. I ached to just take the phone off my belt and walk away. Find a subway. Go lie in my wife’s room, holding her hand. Maeve could always soothe me somehow.

“My God!” Oakley cried in outrage. “How the hell are we going to deliver this bombshell? First we drop the ball with the mayor. Now we let poor John Rooney get killed?”

Then it dawned on me.

There it was.

That was the whole point.

I suddenly understood why the hijackers were wiping out celebrities, one grueling murder at a time.

They wanted things to go slow, methodically slow. That way, the crowds would gather. That way, the media, along with the rest of the world watching at home, would come together to put the pressure on so that this thing would be resolved. But the pressure wasn’t on them, I realized.

It was on us.

Someone had finally done it. Someone had devised law enforcement’s worst nightmare. As time went by and the bodies piled up, we looked worse and worse. It made any decision to breach the cathedral in a rescue attempt almost impossible. If we screwed up, and boom, the place went up, people wouldn’t blame the hijackers, they’d blame us.

I let the crisis phone ring four times before I answered it.

“Hi. It’s Jack,” he said, and actually sounded gleeful. “Hi-Jack. Get it? Sure, it’s not as funny as Rooney, but I’m thinking his stand-up days are over. Time’s up, Mike. No more excuses. No more delays. If all the money isn’t in my account by nine o’clock tomorrow morning, there’ll be so many dead rich and famous people under the ol’ tree this Christmas, Santa’ll have to leave all the presents in the fireplace.”

Chapter 84

IT WAS COMING on two in the morning when I slowly, painfully, lifted my head off the laptop keyboard I’d been using for a pillow. I was aware of the earring Maeve had given me. Also, that for the first time in hours, the activity in the makeshift Rockefeller command center had died down to a murmur.

Our work was almost done here. It had taken every ounce of finagling and begging and negotiating, but we’d somehow gotten all but four of the seventy-three million dollars together.

Delta Force had arrived around midnight and was working with the FBI and NYPD tactical people, trying to find some weakness, some helpful detail that had been overlooked. I’d heard that a mock-up of the cathedral was being built at an army base in Westchester to assist the commandos to plan for a breach.

As a kid, the thought of ever seeing soldiers patrolling the streets of New York was ridiculous, a scene from a B science-fiction movie. Seeing the soldiers on the perimeter of Ground Zero and watching the F-14s buzzing the Midtown skyscrapers as they flew air cover after 9/11 still didn’t seem real to me, but it was.

I sat up as an army general came past my desk. Seeing combat boots on NYC ground twice in one lifetime, I thought as I watched the officer and his entourage enter the command boardroom, seemed unfair.

“Why don’t you take a breather, Mike?” Paul Martelli told me with a yawn. He’d just come back from catching some sleep. “Nothing going on here for a little while.”

“We’re coming down to the end of this thing,” I said. “I don’t want to be missing if I’m needed.”

Martelli patted me on the shoulder.

“Listen, Mike,” he said, “we all know about your wife, your family situation. I can’t even imagine the stress you’re under. We’ll call you the second something develops. Now get out of here. Go be with your family. Mason and I have you covered.”

Martelli didn’t have to tell me twice. Anyway, I felt the negotiations were over—they’d won. We still had to negotiate the hostages’ release and whatever kind of transportation the hijackers thought they would need to get them to safety. But all that could wait.

Maeve was sleeping when I came in. I wasn’t about to wake her from such a peaceful state. On her bedside table, Jimmy Stewart was reluctantly receiving a cigar from Potter on the screen of the portable DVD player. I shut it off.

I stood

there staring at my dear, sweet wife, the treasure of my life.