Step on a Crack (7 page)

STEPHEN HOPKINS SAT by himself in a pew in a small chapel behind the main altar. His head was buried in his hands. He was almost glad Caroline wasn’t around to see what had happened on account of her death. She was such a good soul, it would have hurt her deeply, and it wouldn’t have been an act with Caroline.

There were maybe thirty hostages scattered in the pews around him. He recognized a lot of the faces, well-known folks for the most part, the generous ones whom Caroline had gotten to do charity work and other good deeds.

He looked up at the three masked gunmen standing at the front of the chapel. The bastards were always alert. He’d been around a lot of soldiers, and that’s what they reminded him of. Soldiers? Was that what they were? Former military?

Did that make the motivation political? When the takeover started, his first thought was that it had to be Middle Eastern terrorists-but it was obvious these men were Americans. What the hell did they want? How could they be so brazen? So unafraid of death?

A short, muscular hijacker stepped into the center aisle and cleared his throat rather theatrically.

“Hi, everybody. I’m
Jack
. You can call my big, bad buddy over there
Little John
. Our sincerest apologies for detaining you like this. Anyone who needs to use a bathroom, just raise your hand, and you’ll be escorted. There’s food and water. Again, just raise your hand. Feel free to lie down in the pews or on the floor there in the back. If you cooperate, things will go smoothly. If you don’t, well, the consequences will be very unpleasant. The choice is yours.”

Who was this little twerp to lecture them like they were schoolchildren being held in detention? Stephen Hopkins stood up at the same time as the mayor of New York. The mayor sat back down.

“What’s this all about?” he said angrily. “What do you want with us? Why do you dishonor my wife?”

“Mr. President,” the hijacker said, smiling as he walked down the aisle. “That tone of voice will not do. I’m going out of my way to be polite. I sincerely urge you to do the same.”

Stephen Hopkins’s knuckles went white as he gripped the back of the pew in front of him. He wasn’t used to being spoken to like this by anyone. Not in a long, long time.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “You want decorum. Then would the gentleman
in the ski mask
deign to let the assembly know why he’s holding them hostage?”

A few hostages in the pews laughed nervously and sat up a little straighter.

The lead hijacker looked around at the group. He laughed, too. Then he leaned in and grabbed the former president by his full head of white hair.

“Why, why, why?” he said into his ear. “That was always your weakest side, Stevie-boy. You always had to intellectualize everything.”

“You son of a bitch,” Hopkins yelled, partly because of the pain. It felt like his hair was tearing out of his scalp. This small man, Jack, was very strong.

“Now you’re calling my mother a bitch?” Jack said. “Maybe you’ve gotten your ass kissed so much you forget that it can get kicked, too. Disrespect me again, asshole, and I’ll kick your guts out and make you eat ’em.”

Jack yanked the former president out into the aisle. Finally, he let go of his hair, and Hopkins sank to the floor.

The hijacker let out a deep breath and smiled at the other hostages.

“See that? There goes my temper,” Jack said. “Now you’ve seen my one weakness.”

After a long, thoughtful moment, he made a thumbing motion at the former president.

“Mr. President, you know what? You’ve been through enough today,” he said. “Why don’t you go home? You’re dismissed! Get him the hell out of my church.”

Two of the hijackers grabbed the former president roughly by his elbows and started shoving him quickly into the main part of the church, toward the front doors.

“Tell you the truth, though, Hopkins,” Jack called at the former president’s back. “After meeting you, I’m actually
glad
I voted for Nader. Both times.”

JOHN ROONEY,
LA Times
-
proclaimed “film comic of the decade,” was praying. Seriously lapsed or not, he was baptized a Christian, and he was sitting as still as he could in his pew, silently saying the Lord’s Prayer to beat the band.

He stopped in midprayer when something small and sharp struck him in the side of the neck. When he looked down, he saw that there was a little wad of folded paper on the pew beside him. What the heck was this?

The paper ball was made from a page ripped out of a hymnal. In black ink, someone had written open me right over the musical notes.

Rooney palmed the note as he looked up at the hijackers guarding them. The biggest one-Little John, was it?-sat on the altar as if it were the hood of a car, and he yawned so wide that Rooney could see his back molars.

Rooney opened the note in his lap.

ROONEY-I’M IN THE ROW BEHIND YOU.
SLOWLY
SCOOTCH OVER INTO THE CENTER OF YOUR PEW SO WE CAN TALK. WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T LET THE SCUM IN FRONT SEE YOU!-CHARLIE CONLAN

Rooney shoved the note into his pocket, at least until he could get rid of it. Over the course of the next few minutes, he slid over the polished ash wood of the pew.

When he was about halfway, a gravelly voice behind him whispered, “Jesus, Johnny. I said slowly, not glacially.”

“Sorry,” Rooney whispered back.

“You saw what they did to Hopkins?” Conlan said.

Rooney nodded grimly. “What do you think they want with the rest of us?” he said.

“Nothing good,” Conlan said. “I guarantee you. Thing that scares me is how surrounded by cops this church is. Only thing between these guys getting shot or going to jail for life is us.”

“What can we do about it, though?” Rooney said.

“Fight back,” Conlan said. “Todd Snow’s a row behind me. He’s talking to the tycoon, Xavier Brown, behind him. With you-it’s four.”

“To do what?” Rooney asked. “You saw what they did to Hopkins when he just opened his mouth.”

“We wait for now. Be patient. Pick our spot. Four of us can take one or two of these guys. We go from there.
John, we may not have a choice
.”

THE ELATION THAT
New York Times
reporter Cathy Calvin had felt at being released from the cathedral was quickly being burned away by her annoyance at having to wait on line with everybody else to be interviewed by the police. The NYPD had all the detainees corralled outside of Saks Fifth Avenue, and they weren’t letting anyone go until they’d been debriefed by one of four detectives sitting at a row of folding tables set up on the sidewalk.

Calvin noticed for the first time the news-van microwave towers beyond the blue-and-white sawhorses. They rose above the crowd like the masts of some invading armada.

Wait a second. What was she thinking? And complaining about?
She was where everyone else was trying to get. Inside the ropes
!

Calvin quickly calculated the strategic advantage of her position. She’d been in the cathedral before, during, and after the takeover. She was an eyewitness to the siege, which would make it her exclusive.

Then she spotted Carmella, the lingerie supermodel, three people back in line. Not super A-list, but a good start.

“Carmella? Hi. Cathy Calvin from the
Times
. You okay? Where were you when it happened? What did you see in there?”

“I vas near da front on da left,” the six-foot-two blonde said in her best Austrian American accent. “Poor Caroline’s casket had jus come past our pew. Zen Eberhard, my security man, vas shot right in his crotch vith a tear gas canister. Now I can’t find Eberhard anywhere. I keep texting his cell, but he von’t answer. Have you seen him?”

Cathy Calvin looked at the towering model curiously. Maybe she was in shock. Hopefully, that was it.

“Um. I don’t think so,” Cathy said. “Rumor has it that not all of the hostages have been released. You know anything about that? What have you heard?”

“
Hel-lo
,” the blonde said. “Have you seen John Rooney? How about Laura Winston, or zat little slut Mercedes? Zey are still inside. Zee mayor is still inside. Deez hijackers have no taste. Vy else keep such losers and let me go?”

Vy else, indeed,
Cathy Calvin thought, nodding as she carefully backed away from the model. This psycho woman was actually complaining that she wasn’t still inside. Even if the VIP room was under siege, she wanted in. Yeah, celebrities were normal. They were just like you and me.

Calvin turned away as a hush rolled through the crowd. She peered with the rest of the craning heads toward the cathedral.

Over the hood of a Sanitation Department dump truck, she could see the top of one of the cathedral’s main doors coming open again.
Now what
? She ran forward, hustling to get as close as she could to the hot breaking news.

And then, for the second or third time already this morning, the
Times
reporter couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

“Oh my God,” she whispered out loud.

I WAS STILL in the command center bus, discussing negotiation strategy with Martelli and Mason, when the cathedral doors were flying open for the second time.

It felt like someone had dumped a tray of ice down the back of my shirt when I saw who it was coming out.

Jesus. What were they up to now?

A stunned-looking Stephen Hopkins came stumbling onto the flagstone plaza, and then the doors quickly closed behind him. They’d released Hopkins? But why?

Another completely unexpected move from the hijackers, I thought with a queasy feeling. It was great that they had released the former president, but the way in which they were doing things was all over the place, impossible to predict. Was that the idea? I doubted it.

A spontaneous, thunderous cheer ripped from both the police and the crowd of civilians beyond the barricades.

“Move in,” I heard Commander Will Matthews say. “Pick the president up. I repeat.
Move in and get him out of there. Now
!”

The words were hardly out of the borough commander’s mouth before half a dozen ESU cops nearly gang-tackled the former president and rushed him around the sanitation truck barricade at 50th Street.

I stood, just staring at the cathedral through the trailer window. The spooky gothic arches, the pale granite walls, the dark stained glass, and now Stephen Hopkins released unharmed.

How was I supposed to come up with a way to solve this thing? I thought of Maeve and my kids. I’m not usually one to make excuses, but didn’t I have enough on my plate? I needed another crisis?

Paul Martelli’s hand found my shoulder. “You’re doing the best with a horrible situation, Mike,” he said as if reading my mind. “It’s the losers inside who are responsible for this quagmire. Not us. Don’t forget that.”

“Hey, did you hear the one about the multiagency manhunt for the rabbit in the forest?” Ned Mason said from the corner of the trailer.

I looked up at him. I guess it was joke time.

“No,” I said politely.

“They sent the CIA in first, right?” Mason said. “CIA comes back, says their operatives report there is no rabbit and no forest. Then they send in the Friggin’ Blithering Idiots, and all of a sudden, the forest is on fire and they report that the rabbit had pyrotechnic tendencies and that they saw him with a Zippo. Know what happened when they sent the NYPD into the trees?”

“No, but I’m sure you’ll tell me,” I said with a weary attempt at a smile.

Mason just kept talking. He was even scarier than I remembered him being.

“Two detectives go in and come back out five minutes later, pulling a handcuffed bear with a huge black eye who keeps saying, ‘All right, all right. I’m a rabbit.’ ”

Martelli looked at Mason as I rolled my eyes.

“That joke wasn’t half bad,” Martelli said. “It was all bad.”

EUGENA HUMPHREY SAT motionless and numb, staring at the flickering candles in front of the altar. She was trying to put the last hour into some kind of worthwhile perspective.

The Los Angeles-based talk show host knew that in order to get through any horrifying ordeal the first thing you needed to do was to calm your own emotions. The row of votive candles along the south wall of the chapel had caught her attention almost immediately. There was something reassuring, some comforting element in the way the tiny white flames burned behind the gold-and-red glass.

I can get through this,
she thought to herself. An enormous number of rescuers had to be clustered outside the church right now. And the press. Something this high-profile would be resolved for the simple reason that it had to be.

Eugena swallowed hard, and let out a breath.

Things would be resolved.

When she’d first entered the cathedral for the funeral, she’d thought that its high stone and marble walls were too cold, too stark. But after a few moments of looking upon the votives and feeling the deep silence of this place, she realized it expressed the same spiritual warmness she remembered from the Baptist church her mother took her to every Sunday back in West Virginia.

“My God,” a woman whispered next to her. “My God. How will this horror end?”

It was Laura Winston, the New York fashion magazine institution. Poor Laura was
still
trembling. Her gray-blue eyes bulged as if they were about to pop free of her surgically tightened face. Eugena remembered an attempt to get the trendsetter on her show. She’d obtained Laura’s personal number and had called Laura herself in order to discuss her idea-the most fashionable woman in the world’s advice for a real-world budget.

And she still remembered the high, cackling laugh that had erupted from her earpiece. “Oh, who put you up to this?” Winston had said. “It’s Calvin, isn’t it? Tell Calvin I’ll do Eugena when he goes to work at the Gap.”

What was worse was when, three months later, Winston actually did appear on daytime talk in a segment called “Haute Couture Meets Main Street.” But it was with Oprah, Eugena’s biggest competitor.

Poor woman was a puddle now, though, wasn’t she? Eugena thought with compassion.

She’d been vicious, but
that was then
.

Eugena reached across the space of the pew that separated them.

This was now.

Her soft black hand found the fashionista’s bony white one, and she squeezed gently until the woman looked into her eyes. Eugena put her arm around the distraught woman as she started to hyperventilate.

“Now, now. We’re in a church and in His hands,” Eugena said soothingly. She could hear the strength and faith in her own voice and was proud of herself.

She really could get through this. They all could. Somehow, some way.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” she said. “You’re fine, Laura. This too shall pass.”

“Yes. But will any of us still be alive?”