James Patterson - Worst Case

Brandishing the ugly black pistol high above his head, Mooney looked out at the students. The team members had splayed themselves flat alongside the padded wall to the gym’s rear. In the stands directly beneath the newly hung baseball championship banner, a male teacher was leaning to the side, selflessly trying to shield as many students as he could.

Mooney took a measured breath, fighting down his pounding pulse. He had their rapt attention now. The happy shouts of the six-hundred-strong student body cut off suddenly as if Mooney had pressed a Mute button.

In the sudden hush, the bald headmaster’s terrified breath beside him sounded like he was doing Lamaze. Mooney laid the four-inch barrel of the Beretta against his hairless forehead as he raised the bullhorn.

“Everybody, stay in your seats,” Mooney called out. “Anyone who tries to run will be shot dead. I don’t want to cut your young lives short, but I will. Something must be done. This is it. I’m doing it.”

Warm sweat poured freely down Francis’s face. All that remained of the ashes he had gotten that morning was a faint streak.

Some of the students in the stands seemed oddly fascinated, perhaps in shock. Several young men were fumbling two-handed with their cell phones, texting for help, no doubt. He spotted one none-too-subtle ugly blond kid at the top of the bleachers pointing his camera phone toward the stage. The situation was probably already streaming onto the Internet.

Yes. Let it go out over YouTube, he thought. Let it go out everywhere around the globe. That’s what was needed here. What better impact than something happening real time to shout his message into the deaf ears of the world?

Francis saw that some kids were crying. Tears started to stream unheeded down his own face.

“You were supposed to be the future leaders of this country,” he called to them. “I know this because I attended this prestigious academy myself. Now I’ve come to give you the ultimate test of your worthiness, the ultimate test of your character.”

The megaphone squawked grating feedback as Francis toggled its trigger.

“Listen to me!” he cried. “Question one: While you were playing the Metal Gear and Sniper Elite video games you received at Christmas, how many real-war casualties were there in Iraq and Afghanistan? In Darfur?”

It was full-out bedlam on 25th Street in front of Mooney’s doorless town house. The bomb techs and black-clad Hostage Rescue Team agents were now joined by another thirty or so Manhattan Task Force uniforms, who had come to secure the crime scene.

Positioned center stage on the sidewalk behind the tape, Emily and I paced like expectant parents, calling everyone and anyone we could think of to track down Mooney.

We’d sent Schultz with a team to Inwood to Mooney’s mother’s apartment. Ramirez was over at his law firm, trying to shake some new leads loose, but so far he had come up with diddly.

Every few seconds, streaks of bubbling blue-and-red light from speeding PD radio cars would blow past on Ninth, their sirens whoop-whooping.

“The commissioner has put on the department’s entire day shift and activated the NYPD Anti-Terror Task Force Hercules team,” my boss, Carol Fleming, told me. “Cars and personnel are being deployed to Times Square, Rockefeller Center, all the major population clusters in the city.”

I blew out a frustrated breath. They really had their work cut out for them, considering that Manhattan was actually one large population cluster.

“The commissioner also wants to know yesterday how the hell Mooney got his hands on British military plastic explosive,” I was told.

“I’ll be sure to ask him after I read him his rights,” I told my boss before I hung up.

“Yeah, his last rites,” mumbled Emily, who seemed even more pissed than me.

I glanced at her and came close to chuckling. I remembered way back, three days before, when Parker was a rube Fibbie. Now she was starting to sound like me.

“New York-style bitterness and sarcasm,” I said. “You’re starting to impress me, Agent Parker.”

Both ends of the narrow cross street in the heart of Chelsea were cordoned off now, but of course, more and more people kept arriving by the minute to get a gander. It looked like a street fair near the barricaded bodega on the corner of Ninth. Rent cast member look-alikes were hanging out their windows across the street, standing on their fire escapes with binoculars, gaping down from the roofs. Hadn’t they heard about the possibility of explosives? Guess not.

I hadn’t even had time to put my phone away when my boss called me back.

“Mike, this is-oh, God-something new. Get a Wi-Fi connection. Go to a website called Twitpic. There’s an almost-live podcast called School Takeover.”

“School what?!” I yelled.

Without hanging up, I raced Emily into the back of the FBI truck and found a laptop. I clicked on Internet Explorer and brought up the website.

I opened up the link.

“Tell me that’s a hoax,” Emily pleaded as she looked over my shoulder.

It wasn’t. My breath left me.

It was a still photo of Mooney. He was standing on a gym stage, holding a megaphone in one hand and a gun in the other. The gun was pressed to the head of another man-a teacher? — in a suit. In front of him were hundreds of male high school students wearing private school blazers.

Staring at the man and the terrified children in front of him, I felt an almost out-of-body anger. This was it. Mooney’s last stand. I noticed a large bag beside him. The bomb tech told me that a pound of the PE-4 could blow up a truck. I didn’t even want to think about what nineteen pounds of it could do to all those kids.

“Came in five minutes ago. It’s real,” my boss said.

“What school is it?” I cried.

“We’ve had three calls into nine-one-one in the past ten minutes from mothers whose kids go to St. Edward’s Academy on the Upper East Side. Kids have been texting that a man with a gun just came into their school gym during a pep rally.”

My head dropped until it was practically between my knees. Now Mooney had taken over a school full of children. This was our absolute worst nightmare come true.

“What school?” Emily said.

She jumped back as I punched the side of the truck.

“St. Edward’s. It’s an all-boys private prep school off Park Avenue. The richest schoolkids in the city.”

“We have radio cars arriving on scene right now,” my boss said. “Get up there!”

It was one long yellow blur of taxis outside the windshield as we zipped up Park Avenue. Uniformed doormen and pedestrians stood frozen under the sidewalk awnings, staring after us fearfully. I don’t know which was louder, our siren or the static from the FBI radio as its frequency was flooded with citywide emergency calls.

We skidded to a stop by the armada of blacked-out Chevy Suburbans that had taken up position across East 81st Street.

The SUVs belonged to the NYPD’s intimidating Anti-Terror Hercules Squad. The Special Forces-like team of cops was positioned behind mailboxes and parked cars, aiming their M4 assault rifles at an imposing Gothic-style school building halfway down the block.

A Bentley Continental shrieked to a stop beside us. A sleek silver-haired man in pinstripes and silk suspenders jumped out, leaving the door open. A uniformed cop stiff-armed him as he tried to push over an NYPD sawhorse.

“Let me go. My son’s a St. Edward’s student. He’s in there!” he yelled, tussling with the officer.

I noticed that a rail-thin woman in Jackie O shades was already at the opposite corner, standing beside a Range Rover Westminster with a uniformed chauffeur. A diamond-encrusted hand covered her mouth.