Step on a Crack (Michael Bennett 1)

“Let me see about that,” Jack said skeptically.

I could hear some key clicks in the background. They were checking up on the account from inside the cathedral. Wasn’t the Internet just the best?

“Mikey, me boyo. What a wonderful gift,” Jack finally said after a minute. “I’m about to explode with Christmas

joy.”

“We fulfilled our part of the bargain,” I said, ignoring yet another of his wiseass comments. “We’ve done exactly what you wanted. Now you have to do your part. It’s time to let the hostages go.”

“All in due time, Mike,” Jack said calmly. “All in due time. The hostages will be released all right, but on our terms. What would be the point of getting shot like dogs after all this good work? You know what I’m saying? Here’s what we’re going to need. You got a pen?”

“Tell me,” I said.

“Okay. Here goes. In twenty minutes, I want eleven identical black sedans with dark tinted windows, gassed and ready, parked out front at the Fifth Avenue entrance. The doors will be left open, and the engines left running. Fifth Avenue will be cleared all the way to One thirty-eighth, and Fifty-seventh will be cleared river to river. It goes without saying that any effort to stop and detain us will result in a vast amount of death. If all our demands are met, the remaining hostages will be released unharmed.”

“Anything else?” I said.

“Nope, that’s it,” Jack said. “Arrivederci, Mikey. It’s been a real hoot.”

I almost couldn’t believe it when I heard a dial tone in my ear. That was it?

All they wanted was eleven cars? Where did they think they were going to drive? Mexico?

Behind me, I heard the borough commander speaking into his radio, telling the task force cops to clear Fifth and 57th and to block the side streets off. He got on another radio and told all the rooftop snipers to get ready.

“When they come out, we’ll take them down,” he said. “Anyone who has a clear line of sight has a green light.”

“Roger that,” came back one of the Delta Force guys.

“Oh, and I want GPS on those sedans,” Will Matthews told one of his captains.

“Bennett,” Will Matthews told me, “get up on the roof and into a helicopter, in case we have to pursue.”

Not exactly overjoyed about heights, I can’t say I was extremely psyched about that task, but I nodded okay.

As I stepped into the elevator headed to the roof, I couldn’t imagine how the hijackers were planning on getting five steps out of the cathedral without getting massacred. I hit the button for the top floor.

Guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Chapter 90

I DON’T KNOW how gung ho I would have been to climb into a helicopter that was on the ground, never mind fifty-one stories up. If I wasn’t so pressed for time, I would have crawled to the open doors to avoid the low, heavy chop of rotors.

The pilot must have noticed the green tinge of my face, or had a healthy sadistic streak. The second I was strapped in, the aircraft dropped off the side of the building, express elevator down, leaving my stomach back on the fifty-first floor.

After we slowed and stopped to hover four hundred feet over the intersection of 50th and Fifth, and I was done congratulating myself on not throwing up, I took in the whole of the cathedral for the first time.

It really was a beautiful structure, its spires and ornamentation as delicate and intricate as a wedding cake’s, which was mind-boggling, considering the whole thing was made out of stone. Instead of being dwarfed by the Midtown glass office monoliths it was surrounded by, it seemed to shame them and somehow make it seem like the skyscrapers were out of place.

As I looked down, eleven black Chevy sedans rolled slowly in from the north. They stopped in front of the cathedral, and the uniformed cops driving them jumped out, leaving the doors open.

Squad cars were parked at every intersection to the southern horizon up Fifth, their cherry tops flashing as they blocked the side streets on both sides.

What a scene.

“Doors!” someone called over the police-band crackle.

Down below, the tall front doors of the church began slowly opening.