James Patterson - Worst Case

About twenty feet away with his back to me, Mooney stood at the front railing of the balcony with his captives, yelling down at Emily. Between us, dividing the balcony in half at an angle, was a five-foot-wide stripe of bright sunlight that fell from the Stock Exchange’s front window. I stared at the light intently for a moment before I opened my mouth.

“Francis! Over here! Hey, don’t listen to her!” I called to him.

Mooney swung around toward me, angry and confused. He shook the detonator at me.

“You’re sneaking up on me? Try something, and I’ll do it!” he screamed. “Right now. I’ll do everyone! Where are the fathers? Why is no one listening to me?”

I stared fearfully at the two high school kids and the security chief’s son, all of whom Mooney had bound himself to. They were pale, listless, sweating, eyes glazed with stress and shock. I thought of my oldest boy, Brian, only a few years younger. I wanted them to live. I wanted us all to live. I had to make this happen. Somehow.

“Francis! Calm down, man! It’s me, Mike Bennett,” I said, raising my hands slowly above my head. “I’m not sneaking up on you. I have the fathers in the hall here behind me, like you said. I’ll let them in. You let the boys go. Will you work with me?”

Mooney took a step toward me. His eyes behind his glasses were gleaming now, filled with an unsettling intensity. His taped-together hands holding the detonator were shaking now. I watched his right-hand index finger twitch as it hovered over its trigger.

I struggled to come up with something to calm him down. Emily’s tirade was supposed to be just a distraction, but it had gotten him so riled up, he might set the plastic off by accident.

“Where are they?” Mooney demanded, peering into the darkened doorway at my back.

“At the bottom of the stairwell, Francis. They’re waiting to come up,” I said.

“You’re lying,” Mooney said.

“No,” I said, making eye contact with him as I shook my head. “No more lies, Francis. We just want what’s best for everybody. For you. For those kids. The fathers really want to take their sons’ places. They appreciate that you’ve given them the option, in fact.”

“Yeah, like I believe that,” Mooney said. He took another step closer, his eyes squinting as he tried to peer deeper into the dim stairwell.

“I won’t let anyone go until the fathers come up those stairs and stand in front of me. That’s the deal, Mike. No negotiating. Bring them up here right now.”

I turned around as if I heard something behind me.

“Okay, Francis,” I said. “They’re on the stairs right behind me now. Why don’t we do this? Why don’t you come forward a little and look in the doorway first. You can verify that it’s them. Then you can untangle one of the kids. I don’t want you to think it’s a trick.”

Mooney stood there, thinking about it.

“Okay,” he said, taking another step.

As he came forward, I watched the sunlight from the window glance off his shoe. The light came up his leg, his torso, his two hands grasping the detonator as if in prayer.

“Got him,” the FBI sniper across the street said into the radio in my ear.

I dove to the floor.

Standing in the dusty light, Mooney looked at me in confusion as I hit the deck. Then he turned toward the window I’d lured him in front of.

The shattering of the long front window of the Exchange seemed to happen after Mooney was hit. One second, he was standing there, and the next, the window shattered spectacularly, and he was down, sitting on the floor.

The blood pumping from Mooney’s wrists looked black on the bright faded marble. I scrambled up as Mooney fruitlessly tried to squeeze the detonator trigger. He was having trouble because his blown-apart hands and wrists were now only barely attached to his arms.

The.50 caliber sniper bullets had missed the detonator but hit him through both wrists, completely severing the nerves in both hands.

I felt sorry for Mooney as he wriggled on the floor, moaning and pumping blood.

But that was before he whispered, “Amen,” and lurched up and forward, going for the trigger with his chin.

The third shot came before I’d closed half the distance. The final bullet caught Mooney on his temple. Instead of falling forward, he fell over safely to the side.

“Cease fire!” I yelled into my radio as a thunder of steps came up the balcony stairs.

“No!” I screamed at Jeremy Mason, who’d turned to look at what was left of Francis X. Mooney.

I knelt down in front of the young man tangled in the strings of explosives, shielding him from the sight of Mooney’s body. He’d been through enough. We all had.

“Don’t move, son. It’s going to be okay now,” I said, wiping at the madman’s blood freckled across the boy’s face.

I was trying to extricate the boys when one of the bomb techs tackled me from behind and shoved me back toward the stairs.

The St. Edward’s students came down less than five minutes later. Both of the dads were crying openly as they met them in the building’s foyer. Even the burly security chief, Quinn, sobbed as he wrapped his arms around his doorman son, who appeared a few minutes later.

The cops and brokers crowded outside on Broad Street broke into a cheer as the fathers and sons came out. Someone started up a chant of U-S-A for some reason. Relieved that we were both still alive, Emily and I hugged before heartily joining in.

It took the bomb techs half an hour to secure and remove the explosives. After they left, I went back up to the balcony with Emily and the Crime Scene guys. Head shots are horrible, and this one was no exception. Mooney had actually been shot out of his shoes. I stared at the bloody gouges the.50 caliber rounds had also taken out of the old building’s stone walls. Mooney had made an impact, all right.

I stood there silently with Emily as the medical examiner zippered the body bag closed.

“Check this out,” one of the CSU guys said, coming up to me with a sheet of paper in a plastic evidence bag. “It was stuffed into the pocket of Mooney’s jacket.”

WARNING TO A WORLD ON THE EVE OF DESTRUCTION was its title. It was a litany of what was wrong with the world. Facts about poverty and famine and disease. Across the bottom, Mooney had scribbled NO ONE IS LISTENING! in red pen.

Emily lifted an eyebrow at me as I removed the sheet from the plastic. I tore it in half. Then in half again.

“That bastard invalidated everything he had to say the second he started hurting innocent people,” I said, ripping it a third time. “Screw his message, whether it’s true or false. I’ll take C, none of the above.”

I felt Parker’s hand on the back of my neck as I tossed the ripped paper off the balcony.

“Amen, Mike,” she said as the torn pieces disappeared among the stock tickets that littered the floor.

Emily got off easy. She didn’t have to buy dinner that night after all. Parrish and Mason got together and insisted on throwing a dinner for the entire task force at none other than the famous Tavern on the Green on Central Park West.

They rented out one of the small dining rooms for the nearly one hundred cops who showed up. Schultz and Ramirez, who’d arrived early to the open bar, looked like they were into double-digit Bellinis. Most likely looking at a pay-grade increase, they wrapped their arms around each other when the hired ten-piece swing band started playing “ New York, New York.”

“I want to wake up in a city that doesn’t sleep,” they sang, Rockette-kicking infront of the laughing tuxedoed musicians. “To find I’m A number one, top of the list, king of the hill.”