Step on a Crack (8 page)

LAURA WINSTON HAD DRIED most of her tears with a chic red silk scarf she’d removed from her jacket pocket and was quietly thanking Eugena for her kindness when there was a loud commotion up toward the altar.

Somebody was standing up!

From the tangle of blond hair and black mini, Laura could tell it was the haute-trash pop singer Mercedes Freer.

Marble rang as she clicked in her six-inch stilettos toward the rear of the chapel.

“Sit the hell down!” one of the hijackers yelled at her immediately, and very loudly.

“
Could I fucking talk to someone, please
? I need to talk to your boss, if you don’t fucking mind,” the diva said, her foul language echoing off the walls of the church. “Just let me talk to somebody in charge!”

Laura and Eugena craned their necks to watch the spectacle along with the rest of the hostages. What the hell was this crazy woman up to?

The lead hijacker arrived on the scene a moment later.

“What is it?” Jack said. “
Talk
to me. I’m a fan, after all. How can I help?”

Mercedes plucked first one, then the other of her diamond earrings off and offered them to Jack.

“These are Cartier,” she said in a loud whisper. “I paid, or whatever, a quarter of a million dollars for them. Now, I’m supposed to be on Leno tonight, and he tapes at six,
LA time
, and I’m already running late. You know what I’m saying? I’m not political or religious, nothing like that. My label arranged for me to sing ‘Ave Maria’ and jet. Please take ’em. They’re real, and they’re yours. They’re not enough, I’ll get my manager on the phone. Say the word. Let’s make a deal, sugar.”

Eugena winced at the white girl’s attempted inner-city speak. After booking her on the show a year ago, Eugena remembered reading in her bio that she’d been born in white-bread New Canaan, Connecticut. Eugena thought about all the elocution books she’d gotten out of the library to get the sound of poor
out
of her voice. What a sorry state this upside-down world had come to.

The hijacker held up the earrings as if appraising them. Then he flicked them one after the other right into the girl’s face.

“How about instead,” he said slowly, “you sit your slutty ass down.”

Mercedes’s face darkened. Then she snapped her fingers in the hijacker’s face. “Slutty what?” she said angrily. “Who you think you’re talkin’ to, shorty?”

The hijacker immediately pulled out a spray canister from his pocket. He grabbed the singer by her hair and emptied it into her face. Mercedes’s face looked like it was blistering as she screamed through the pepper spray.

As she fell to her knees, Jack calmly dragged her across the marble center aisle by her hair, right to the door of a confessional on the north wall. He opened it, threw the girl in with force, then slammed it shut.

“Little hot shit for the hot shit,” he said to the wide-eyed hostages. “Anybody else want to discuss their travel plans?”

Next, Jack tapped his foot in the silence.

“Guess not,” he finally said. “Well, listen up, kids. We need to start an individual interview process, so I’m going to have to go ahead and ask everyone to line up in front of the first door to the right at the back of the chapel.
Now
!”

Eugena stood and turned meekly around along with the rest of the hostages. As she came out into the aisle, she could hear Mercedes whimpering inside the confessional.

She almost felt sorry for the girl, but what good was it to antagonize these men? What did she think was going to happen? What was she thinking? She probably actually thought he would let her go, Eugena decided. When was the last time a human being had said no to the spoiled-brat music star?

As Eugena got in the queue behind the others, she decided that out of everyone in here,
she
was the one to speak to their captors. No one had a better chance of success than she did. For better or worse, it had always been that way.

She glanced at the golden, glowing rows of flickering candles. Maybe that was the reason she’d been put here, Eugena thought.

To try to talk her way out of this.

CHARLIE CONLAN waited on line for his “interview” in front of one of the purple-draped confessionals along the south walkway.

Sounded a little melodramatic if you asked him, more cheesy scare tactics like the masks and robes. It seemed like the hijackers were trying to play off the gothic mood of the place, get people afraid, keep ’em off balance at all times. Fairly intelligent tactics, actually.

Conlan knew most over-the-hill rock legends like him were pretty soft. But few had his background. What growing up poor on the downtown streets of Detroit had failed to teach him, an extended stay at the Hanoi Hilton for most of ’69 had filled in pretty well.

Conlan steeled himself as the dark wood door finally opened and a woman, Marilyn Rubenstein, emerged from her “interview.” He saw that the young actress looked shaken as she came closer to him. Her blond hair was plastered to her scalp with sweat, and her glazed-over eyes looked as if she had just been forced to witness something grossly wrong.

She caught Conlan gaping at her as the guards led her past. “Do what they say,” she advised in a whisper.

“
Next
,” the hijacker at the door called in a bored voice. “That means
you
, hotshot.”

Conlan hesitated; then he stepped across the marble entryway and into the room.

It wasn’t a confessional, Conlan realized immediately. It was a little security room. Some folding chairs, a table. A coffee machine and a row of charging walkie-talkies on a metal desk along one wall.

Sitting at the metal table in the middle of the room was the lead hijacker, Jack. He motioned to the empty metal chair on the opposite side of the table.

“Please, Mr. Conlan, have a seat. I’m a big fan, by the way.”

Conlan sat. “Thank you.”

On the table between them were two items. A pair of handcuffs in a clear plastic bag and a roll of duct tape. Conlan eyed the items, trying to keep the fear in his belly from rising.
Don’t show ’em anything, Charlie. Everything close to the vest
.

Jack lifted a clipboard from his lap. His pen clicked.

“Okay, Mr. Charlie Conlan,” he said. “In order to facilitate things here, I’m going to have to ask you for the names and numbers of your financial people. Any kind of pin or access codes that are needed to get to your funds, passwords, that sort of thing, would be most helpful.”

Conlan forced himself to smile as he made eye contact with Jack.

“So all this is about money?” he said.

The hijacker tapped the pen against the top of the clipboard and frowned.

“I don’t have the time for idle chitchat, Mr. Conlan,” Jack said. “Are you going to cooperate or not? Last chance.”

Conlan decided he needed to push the envelope some. See exactly what they were dealing with here.

“Let me think about that for a second,” he said, rubbing his chin with his fingertips. “Agghh. Ummmm. Fuck, no?”

Jack slowly took the cuffs out of the plastic bag, and then he stood. He walked behind Conlan and quickly, expertly cuffed his wrists behind his back.

Conlan clenched his jaw as he waited for the first blow to come. He’d had teeth pulled out with pliers. He hoped the little Napoleonic bastard had brought his lunch.

But the first blow didn’t come.

Instead there was a quick
rustle
-and the plastic bag was plopped over Conlan’s head.

Tape shrieked, and then a nooselike pressure encased Charlie Conlan’s neck, closing the bag with an airtight seal. Sweat immediately began flooding out of his pores. The plastic clung to his skin like grease, rattled in his mouth and nostrils as he took a panicked breath.

“Little hot in there, isn’t it, hardass?” Jack said through the membrane of plastic near Conlan’s ear.

Conlan gagged. His throat was burning up.
Oh God, Christ, no. Not like this
.

Jack sat down, yawned, and crossed his legs as Conlan convulsed. After an eternity, Jack checked his watch.

“You want to sign up for my cash-for-oxygen program?” he asked. “Up to you.”

Plastic crackled in Conlan’s ears as he nodded vigorously.

Jack reached across the table, and air, sweet air, rushed in around his gloved finger as he poked a small hole in the bag.

“I thought the Beatles were an influence of yours, Charlie,” Jack said, smiling as he drummed his fingers on the table. “C’mon. Don’t you remember? ‘The best things in life are free’?”

Conlan gasped and wheezed with his head down against the table. The clipboard was slid beside his chin. A pen landed on top of it.

Two thoughts pounded through Conlan’s brain with the returning oxygen. The first was a prayer. The second a curse.

My God.

We’re completely fucked.

I HAD JUST GOTTEN OFF the phone with Maeve, and I was thinking,
I needed to hear her voice even more than she needed to hear from me
.

Just then, Steve Reno sauntered into the command trailer carrying a cardboard box of sandwiches and coffee. He gave me one of the coffees along with a handshake.

I remembered Steve from several standoffs. Like most of the top cops in the NYPD, the tall, long-haired, muscular tactical officer was kind of an anomaly. No one was more patient and compassionate on the outside of a barricaded door-and no one was quicker when it had to be kicked in. Steve Reno was definitely a mystery man. Three wives so far, five kids, lived in SoHo but drove a pickup truck with a Semper Fi sticker on the rear window.

Behind him were two FBI commandos in black SWAT fatigues. The shorter of the two could have been a plumber, or a shop teacher, except for the bright green eyes that scanned the trailer and me with the efficient sweep of a copying machine light bar.

“Mike, this is Dave Oakley from HRT,” Steve told me. “The greatest tactical team supervisor alive.”

“Let’s just keep it that way, huh, Steve? No mess-ups today,” the commando said with a gruff, humorless laugh as I shook his callused hand. “What’s the story with our new best friends inside?”

I filled him in as best I could. The only change in the commando’s expression was a compression of his lips when I mentioned the explosives. He nodded quietly when I was done.

“We got our work cut out for us today,” Reno finally said. “We already spoke to Secret Service. President Hopkins told them the remaining hostages are being held in the Lady Chapel at the far rear of the church. He said that in addition to being extremely calm, the kidnappers aren’t taking an iota of shit from any of the captives. They seemed trained, well disciplined. They’re not terrorists. They’re American, apparently. New one to me.”

“New one to all of us,” I said as the door opened again behind Reno.

Another baseball-hat-wearing ESU cop came in with an elderly man in a tweed cap. The old man was carrying a large cardboard cylinder. What the hell was this all about?

“I’m Mike Nardy, the cathedral’s caretaker,” he said, popping open the cylinder’s lid. “The rectory told me to bring these here.”

I helped him unroll the blueprints. The paper was old, yellowed at the edges, but the detailing of the cathedral was extensive. I used a couple of chattering radios to hold it open as Reno, Oakley, and Commander Will Matthews leaned over to look.

The overhead view of St. Patrick’s Cathedral looked like a cross. The main Fifth Avenue entrance was at the bottom of the long piece, and the 50th and 51st Street entryways at the sides of the shorter one. The Lady Chapel, like a small extension at the top of the long part of the cross, had no way in or out.

“I got snipers in Saks on Forty-ninth and in 620 Fifth behind us,” said Oakley. “I’ll have to get one on Madison at the rear to watch the Lady Chapel. Too bad these damn stained-glass windows are about as clear as a brick wall. Mr. Nardy, it’s hard to tell from these schematics. Is there a clear line of sight from the rose window here in the front to the Lady Chapel in the rear?”

“In part,” the serious old man said with a curious squint of his face. “Though there are columns along the back of the altar and a fifty-seven-foot baldachin, that’s a bronze gazebo-type structure, over the altar.”

“The cathedral’s a block long. What’s that, five hundred feet?” Oakley said to his second-in-command. “We do our reconnaissance. Fiber-optic camera through one of those windows, maybe. Get heat signatures of the weapons to pick out the bad guys. Time’s right, we rappel down the front edifice, blow the rose window and all the chapel windows simultaneously.”

“I know I must be going a little deaf,” the caretaker, Nardy, said to Oakley. “Because for a second there, I thought you said you were going to destroy the great rose window of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.”

“You don’t have to concern yourself with police business, Mr. Nardy, is it?” Oakley said. “Lives are on the line. We’ll do what we have to do.”

“That rose window is a hundred and fifty years old, sir,” the caretaker said, folding his stick-thin arms. “It’s irreplaceable, as are the windows of the Lady Chapel and every other of the cathedral’s last artifacts and statues. You wouldn’t be so quick to blow a hole in the side of the Statue of Liberty, would you? Well, this church is this city’s Statue of Faith, so you better come up with some other plan. You’ll destroy it over my dead body.”

“Remove Mr. Nardy, somebody, please,” Oakley said, annoyed.

“You better listen to me!” Nardy said forcefully as the ESU cop escorted him back outside. “I’ll go right to the press.”

That’s all we needed, wasn’t it? I thought. Another challenge, another messy obstacle. This thing wasn’t hard enough without having our hands tied behind our backs.

Oakley turned his black baseball hat around on his head. He looked like a catcher who’d missed the throw to second on a steal as he exhaled loudly into his cupped hands.

“Jesus, would you look at this clambake?” Oakley said. “The granite walls are what? Two feet thick? The doors are foot-thick bronze. I don’t think we’ve ever tried to breach either a door
that big
, or one made of
bronze
.

“Even the
precious
windows have stone tracery. There’s no adjoining buildings we can try to tunnel our way in from. This place is a fortress. St. Pat’s is probably the best place in this city to hold off an army. And we have to infiltrate it without blowing it up or leaving a scratch. Would somebody please remind me why I took this job?”

“The fat sneaker contracts and the book deals,” I said. “Just like the rest of us.”

It was a lame joke, but under the circumstances I didn’t need to be Billy Crystal to provide an outlet for the mounting stress. Everyone, including the stoic Oakley, got a pretty good laugh.

It was either that or cry.