Worst Case - James Patterson [70]
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?”
Chapter 81
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