James Patterson - Worst Case

“Do you have their number?” I said.

As I dialed the firm, I spotted the agonizingly distant Manhattan skyline through a break of parkway trees. Goddammit. We needed to be there yesterday. Had Mooney struck yet? Would he hit his office? Were we too late?

“Ericsson, Weymouth and Roth. May I put you on hold?” said a pleasant female voice.

“Hell, no!” I yelled. “This is Detective Mike Bennett of the NYPD. This is extremely urgent. I need to know if Francis X. Mooney came to work today.”

“Mr. Mooney? He’s one of our senior partners. I can patch you through to his voice mail,” the voice said.

“Listen to me!” I screamed. “We have reason to believe Mr. Mooney is armed and extremely dangerous, suicidal, and homicidal. Has he come in? Yes or no?”

“Oh, my God!” the woman said. “I’m not sure.”

“Check now!” I yelled.

The phone thumped down.

“I just spoke to his secretary,” the receptionist said. “He’s not here. The office manager is right here, though.”

“This is Ted Provencal,” said a man a moment later.

“Mike Bennett from the NYPD. We have reason to believe that your coworker Francis Mooney is responsible for the rash of recent teenage killings.”

I heard the man breathing heavily. He seemed stunned.

“Francis?” he said. “Francis?!”

“I know it’s a shock. But I need as much information about him as I can gather. Where is he right now?”

“I don’t know. He has no meetings scheduled. Francis has been in and out recently. Ever since he was diagnosed with lung cancer, we rolled his casework back. He’s been on flex time.”

So that explained the drug, I thought.

“Mooney has cancer?” I said.

“Stage four, non-small-cell,” the man said. “He found out three months ago. Too far gone to even do surgery, the poor guy. He was a two-pack-a-day man. We begged him to quit. Offered him incentives. It seemed so stupid for such a brilliant man.”

“He’s smart? How smart?”

“Without question one of the smartest men I’ve ever known. And meticulous? If he ever missed a detail in a contract or a will, I never heard about it. He was the head of our Estates and Trusts division. One of the most popular people in the whole firm, too, with both colleagues and clients. He even ran our pro bono department. I mean, are you a hundred percent sure he’s involved? That horrible thing from the paper? Those kids who were shot? It’s truly unbelievable. Are you sure?”

“Believe it,” I hollered at him. “Police are on their way. Lock down your office, and tell your security chief to keep Mooney out of the building at all costs. He’s armed, and we think he might have explosives.”

We were screeching off the West Side Highway at 23rd in Chelsea when Emily received a call on her Fed phone. We were directed to an ugly beige-brick high-rise around the corner from Eighth Avenue and 25th Street.

As we swerved down into its underground garage, a large, dirty white box truck flashed its lights at us. Emily stopped behind the truck’s graffiti-covered back gate.

The gate rolled up, revealing a spotless interior filled with racks of computer servers and screens. It seemed like every inch of the walls was layered in cables for the very complicated-looking electronics equipment. What was most surprising by far, though, were the half dozen men dressed in tactical black, securing submachine guns on a bench along both walls. They completely ignored us as they busily tightened the snaps and clips on their various weapons and gear.

“HRT’s Mobile Tactical Operations Center,” Emily explained as we climbed in. “State-of-the-art surveillance setup and command center rolled into one. There’s fiber-optic cameras and boom microphones, as well as audio and visual com links to all the forward sniper observers.”

“Welcome to your Homeland Security dollars hard at work,” a handsome young Asian agent said as he flipped up his ballistic goggles and gave Emily a quick fist tap.

“Mike, meet Tom Chow. He’s head of HRT two,” Emily said.

Chow pointed to a computer screen showing a two-story brick town house.

“Thar she blows,” he said. “We’ve been here about half an hour, and there’s been no movement in or out. We can’t confirm if he’s inside.”

From beside the computer, Chow lifted up some photographs of Mooney’s building taken from various overhead angles.

“We figure we have two breach points, the roof and the front door,” he said, pointing them out. “See this other taller building to the east alongside? That’s a warehouse. We already have a team up there ready to fast-rope down to Mooney’s roof deck and gain entry. Sniper observers across the street will cover the windows so the rest of us, the breach team, can blow the front door. EMS is around on Tenth, ready to come in once we locate the kid.”

Chow turned as an oversized NYPD van pulled in behind our car. A black Labrador wagged its tail on the front seat between two cops wearing bulky gray bombproof suits.

“Hey, now,” Chow said. “Even the Bomb Squad is here. Time to get this party started.”

Chow pulled a ringing cell phone from his fatigues a moment later. He listened briefly. He was smiling as he shut it. He lowered his goggles and pounded on the tinted Plexiglas that separated the back of the assault truck from its cab.

“That’s the green light, people. We got it. Roll this sister.”

Emily and I strapped on borrowed vests as the truck’s back gate rolled down. My stomach rolled, too, as the truck suddenly lurched forward up the ramp.

A split second later, the truck came to a whiplash-inducing stop. Its back door went up like a snapped shade, and the FBI commandos sprinted out onto the street toward the town house. Faster than they could ring the doorbell, a charge was placed by the knob, and Mooney’s door blew back into the house with a low thump.

Two men in black rappelled off the building beside the town house as the commandos on the street rushed into it behind their Heckler and Koch MP5s.

In a chaos of radio chatter and shouts, I followed them over the sidewalk with my Glock drawn. Emily was right on my heels with a Remington shotgun.

“Please be home, fucker,” she said at my back as we ran.

“Yes, fucker,” I agreed. “Please, pretty please, be home.”

As the door to his town house was being blown into tiny pieces, Francis X. Mooney stopped on the corner of Park Avenue sixty blocks to the northeast and set down his bag.

He turned toward the four-story Gothic school building that took up most of the north side of 85th Street between Park and Lexington. It was St. Edward’s Academy, the elite private school he had attended from seventh grade through senior year.

He was filthy from his scuffle, wet from the rain, and completely exhausted from the walk, but he’d made it, hadn’t he?

He’d come back full circle to the place where it had all begun.

He stood for a second, remembering his first day here. He’d stood in this same spot, sick and frozen, with the scholarship-kid certainty that his clothes, his face, and every other inch of his being wouldn’t be up to snuff.

He quickly removed the Beretta from the valise and tucked it into the waistband of his trousers and smoothed his jacket over it.

The butterflies never changed, he thought, finally hefting his case with a swallow of his dry throat.

Just the reasons.

I can’t do this, he thought.

I must do this, he thought.

“Francis? Francis, is that you?”

Francis turned. A tall, lean black man about his age was stopped beside him, smiling. He wore a St. Edward’s ball cap and held a takeout bag.