James Patterson - Worst Case

Coughing in the flash-bang grenade smoke, I found a window in Mooney’s kitchen and threw it open.

“Goddang!” Emily rebel-yelled as she laid her pump shotgun on the granite kitchen island. “We missed his ass.”

“Damn it,” I said with disgust.

I loosened one of the Velcro straps on the heavy body armor and sat down next to her. Hostage Rescue had scoured every room on both floors, and there was nothing. No one was home. No Mooney. And even worse, no Dan Hastings.

After a quick call to my boss, I learned that Mooney still hadn’t shown up to work. Which was good in a way, since he just might be looking to kill everyone there. But if not at work, then where was he?

“Where should we toss first?” I said.

“Office,” she said.

We went up to the second floor and pooched through his office. And by pooched, I mean we tore it apart. In filing cabinets, we found trusts and estates folders, take-home work from his job probably. One of the walls was covered with photos of Francis at high-profile charity events. There were quite a few framed Vanity Fair and Avenue magazine pages. A business card in a side drawer said Mooney was something called a Philanthropy Consultant. To high-net-worth individuals, no doubt, by the gala events he was often photographed at.

One of the commandos called to us excitedly from downstairs.

“I think I found something, Em,” Chow said as we arrived in the basement. He pointed his gun-barrel-mounted flashlight at an open door. I reached in and flicked on the light switch.

I stood there, blinking, but not at the light. Against cement walls stood stack upon stack of newspapers and books. They were six feet high in some places. It looked like a pretty eclectic collection. There was a whole section of anti-Bush nonfiction. Well-thumbed tomes of Spinoza. A book called Quantum Geometry of Bosonic Strings sat on top of an autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. I spotted some French-language Rousseau and Alexis de Tocqueville volumes that had margin notes handwritten in French. There were many books by Jean-Paul Sartre and the modern French philosopher Michel Foucault.

“This guy might be a killer and a kook,” Emily said, “but at least he’s a well-read one.”

In a metal filing cabinet drawer we found a laptop. Emily pulled on surgical gloves before she turned it on. The laptop’s whole screen was filled with numbered Word documents.

Emily clicked on a random one. It was random, all right.

“‘They must be shown,’” she read. “‘Communication is futile. Like Malcolm X, I, too, am branded with the philosophy of any-means-necessary. I, too, am a free-willed, informed human being who has gifts that transcend the ordinary. I, too, have responsibilities that transcend the ordinary. I, too, have-’”

“‘A mental disease that transcends the ordinary,’” I finished for her.

“It goes on and on,” Emily said, scrolling with the mouse. “Oh, my God, it’s five hundred pages. There must be a hundred of these documents. It’ll take months to dredge through this nonsense.”

That’s when we heard the barking.

It was the bomb dog. He was at the top of the basement stairs, barking down at us, going absolutely crazy.

“I don’t think he needs to be walked,” Chow yelled. “Clear it! Now! Everybody out!”

He didn’t have to tell us twice. We were across the cordoned-off street on the safe side of the SWAT truck when the bomb guys came out ten minutes later. Each of them was holding a cardboard box.

The older, mustached bomb tech waved me over to the back of his van. I swallowed. I didn’t think he was inviting me to tailgate with him.

“Better you than me, Mike,” Emily said, sticking her fingers in her ears.

“Found it in the crawl space next to the basement office,” the bomb cop said as I approached. I gingerly looked into the box he was holding. Inside was a stack of long white blocks that looked like they were made of Crisco.

“Relax. It’s C-four,” the veteran cop said with a dismissive wave. “Well, actually, I’m pretty sure it’s PE-four, the very similar British version of the plastic explosive. It’s totally stable. You could play stickball with it. Hell, you could light it on fire and nothing would happen. Nothing happens unless you wire it to…”

He paused while he showed me the other box, which contained a reel of what looked like thick green clothesline.

“A detonator. This one here is called Cordtex. It looks like rope, acts like rope, but it has an explosive core that makes it one long mother of a blasting cap. You can fell a tree with six feet of it. Or a building if you connect it with enough of the PE-four from box number one.”

The bomb cop stroked his mustache and sighed in a way that raised the hair on the back of my neck.

“What?” I said.

“The problem is the box,” he said.

“The box?” I said.

“The PE-four came in a twenty-five-pound box. There’s only six or seven pounds here. Also, I’d say about half the reel of det cord is missing.”

I didn’t have a mustache, so I rubbed my temples instead as I turned and took in the 360-degree city vista of buildings and buses and pedestrians. Targets as far as the eye could see. Mooney could be anywhere at all.

“Shit,” I said.

“You said it,” the bomb cop said.

Francis adjusted the St. Edward’s ball cap that he had taken from the dead coach as he walked quickly through the school’s empty corridors. He smiled as he passed his old chem lab. How the rest of them had hated him for always wrecking the curve with his near-perfect scores.

He opened a door into the empty lower school’s practice gym. It still smelled like sweat and Bengay. He gazed at the thick patina of paint on the walls, the battered gates on the tall windows. How many layups had he made across its parquet? How many laps around the dusty loft track above? Passing across, he unscrewed the silencer from the Beretta and hook-shot it at the hoop from the top of the key. It fell short by at least three feet.

“Air ball. What else is new?” he grumbled, pocketing the pistol.

The roar of the crowd hit him like a smack as he came through a door into the cavernous upper-school gym. The stands were filled with the all-boy student body. In their blazers and khakis, they looked somewhat similar to his class, though their long hair and loose ties would have earned them a detention in his oppressive day. There were a lot more brown faces now, though, so at least some progress had been made.

“Let’s go, St. Ed’s!” the headmaster was chanting through a bullhorn. “Here we go, St. Ed’s!” Beside him, kids with baseball jerseys over their ties were pumping their fists and waving their arms upward for more noise.

The sound reminded him of the all-city semifinal. The heat and cheers and the smash of the ball against the parquet. He hadn’t played a minute in it, despite what the coach had promised. Webb had won it for them at the buzzer. He’d left as they were raising that shit heel on their shoulders. He’d certainly received a terrific education at St. Edward’s, though. It was here where he first learned how entirely shitty humanity could be.

People were staring at him as he came along the stands.

He pointed at his hat and waved at them vigorously.

“Here we go, St. Ed’s!” he yelled along with the crowd as he approached the stage.

The headmaster was jumping up and down, letting off an air horn, when Francis jumped on the stage beside him. His face scrunched in surprise as Mooney put the gun to his temple.

“I am a good person,” Francis said to him as he ripped the bullhorn from his hands.