Cathedral (57 page)

The Cardinal turned his head toward Hickey. "The Church has survived ten thousand like you," he said impassively, "and will survive you, and grow stronger precisely because there are people like you among us."

"Is that a fact?" Hickey balled his hand into a fist but was aware that Gallagher had come up behind him. He turned and led Gallagher by the arm back to the open crypt doors. "Stay here. Don't speak to him and don't listen to him."

Gallagher stared down the steps. The Cardinal's outstretched arms and red robes covered half the grillwork. Gallagher felt a constriction in his stomach; he looked back at Hickey but was not able to hold his stare.

Gallagher turned away and nodded.

Hickey took the staircase that brought him up to the right of the altar and approached Maureen and Baxter. They rose as he drew near.

Hickey indicated two gas masks that lay on the length of the pew that separated the two people. "Put those on at the first sign of gas. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's the sight of a woman vomiting-reminds me of my first trip to Dublin-drunken whores ducking into alleys and getting sick. Never forgot that."

Maureen and Baxter stayed silent. Hickey went on, "It may interest you to know that the plan of this attack was sold at us at a low price, and the plan doesn't provide much for your rescue or the saving of this Cathedral."

Baxter, said, "As long as it provides for your death, it's a fine plan."

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Hickey turned to Baxter. "You're a vindictive bastard. I'll bet you'd like to bash in another young Irishman's throat, now you've got the hang of it and the taste for it."

"You're the most evil, twisted man I've ever met." Baxter's voice was barely under control.

Hickey winked at him. "Now you're talking." He turned his attention to Maureen. "Don't let Megan or Leary shoot you, lass. Take cover between these pews and lie still in the dark. Very still. Here's your watch back, my love. Look at it as the bullets are whistling over your head. Keep checking it as you stare up at the ceiling. Sometime between 6:03 and 6:04 you'll hear a noise, and the floor will bounce ever so slightly beneath your lovely rump, and the columns will start to tremble. Out of the darkness, way up there, you will see great sections of ceiling falling toward you, end over end, as in slow motion, right onto your pretty face. And remember, lass, your last thoughts while you're being crushed to death should be of Brian--or Harry . . . any man will do, I suppose." He laughed as he turned away and walked toward the bronze plate on the floor. He bent over and lifted the plate.

Maureen called after him: "My last thought will be that God should have mercy on all our souls . . . and that your soul, John Hickey, should finally rest in peace."

Hickey threw her a kiss, then dropped down the ladder, drawing the bronze plate closed over him.

Maureen sat back on the pew. Baxter stood a moment, then moved toward her. She looked up at him and put out her hand. Baxter took it and sat close beside her so that their bodies touched. He looked around at the flickering

shadows. "I tried to picture how this would endbut this . . . 11

"Nothing is ever as you expect it to be. . . .never expected you to be . . ."

Baxter held her more tightly. "I'm frightened."

"Me too." She thought a moment, then smiled. "But we made it, you know.

We never gave them an inch."

He smiled in return. "No, we never did, did we?"

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Flynn peered into the darkness to his right and stared at the empty throne, then looked out through the carved wooden screen to where the chance] organ keyboard stood on its platform beside the sanctuary. A candle was lit on the organ console, and for a moment he thought John Hickey was sitting at the keys. He blinked, and an involuntary noise rose in his throat. Pedar Fitzgerald sat at the organ, his bands poised over the keys, his body upright but tilted slightly back. His face was raised toward the ceiling as if fie were about to burst into song. Flynn could make out the tracheal tube stiff protruding from his mouth, the white dead skin, and the open eyes that looked alive as the flame of the candle danced in them. "Hickey," he said softly to himself, "Hickey, you unspeakable, filthy, obscene . . ." He glanced up into the choir loft but could not see Megan, and he concentrated again on the front doors.

5:20 came, then 5:25-

Flynn looked around the column to his rear and saw Maureen and Baxter huddled together. He watched them briefly, then turned back to the vestibule.

5:30.

A tension hung in the still, cold air of the Cathedral, a tension so palpable it could be heard in the steady beating chests, felt on the sweaty brows, tasted in the mouth as bile, seen in the dancing lights, and smelled in the stench of burning phosphorous.

5:35 came, and the thought began to take hold in the minds of the people in the Cathedral that it was already too late to mount an attack that would serve any purpose.

In the long southwest triforium George Sullivan put down his rifle and picked up his bagpipes. He tucked the bag under his arm, adjusted the three drone pipes over his shoulder, and put his fingers on the eight-holed chanter, and then put his mouth to the blowpipe. Against all orders and against all reason he began to play. The slow, haunting melody of "Amazing Grace" floated from the chanter and hummed from the drone pipes into the candlelit silence.

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There was a very slight, almost imperceptible lessening of tension, a relaxing of vigilance, coupled with the most primitive of beliefs that if you anticipated something terrible, imagined it in the most minute detail, it would not happen.

477

For the great Gaels of Ireland

Are the men that God made mad,

For all their wars are merry,

And all their songs are sad.

G. K. Chesterton

Bellini stood at the open door of the small elevator in the basement below the Achbishop's sacristy. An ESD man stood on the elevator roof and shone a handheld spotlight up the long shaft. The shaft began as brick, but at a level above the main floor it was wood-walled and seemed to continue up, as Stillway had pointed out, to a level that would bring it through the triforium's attic.

Bellini called softly, "How's it lookT'

The ESD man replied, "We'll see." He took a tension clamp from a utility pouch, screwed it tightly to the elevator cable at hip level, and then stepped onto it and tested its holding strength. He screwed on another and stepped up to it. Step by step, very quickly now, he began working his way up the shaft to the triforium level eight stories above.

Bellini looked back into the curving corridor behind him. The First ESD

Assault Squad stood silently, laden with equipment and armed with silenced pistols and rifles that were fitted with infrared scopes.

On the floor just outside the elevator a communications man sat in front of a small field-phone switchboard that was connected by wire to the remaining ESD Assault Squads and to the state office in Rockefeller Center. Bellini said to the man, "When the shit hits the fan, intersquad communication takes priority over His Honor and the Commissioner. . . .

In fact, I don't want to hear from them unless it's to tell us to pull out."

'Me commo man nodded.

Burke came down the corridor. His face was smeared 481

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with greasepaint, and he was screwing a big silencer onto the barrel of an automatic pistol.

Bellini watched him. "This don't look like Los Angeles, does it, Burke?"

Burke stuck the automatic in his belt. "Let's go, Belfini."

Bellini shrugged. He climbed the stepladder and stood on the roof of the elevator, and Burke came up beside him in the narrow shaft. Bellini shone his light up the wall until it rested on the oak door that opened on the Archbishop's sacristy twenty feet above. He said to Burke in a quiet voice,

"If there's a Fenian standing there with a submachine gun and he hears us climbing, there'll be a waterfall of blood and bodies dropping back on this elevator."

Burke shifted Bellini's light farther up and picked out the dim outline of the climbing man, now about one hundred feet up the shaft. "Or there may be an ambush waiting up there at the top."

Bellini nodded. "Looked good on paper." He shut off his light. "You got about one minute to stop being an asshole and get out of here."

.,Okay."

Bellini glanced up at the dark shaft. "I wonder . . . I wonder if that door or any door in this place is mined?" Bellini was speaking nervously now.

"Remember in the army . . . all the phony minefield signs? All the other bullshit psy-warf are . . . ?" He shook his head. "After the first shot everything is okay . . . it's all the shit before . . . . Flynn's got me psyched out. . . . He understands . . . I'm sure he's crazier than me. . .

."

Burke said, "Maybe Schroeder told him how crazy you really are . . . maybe Flynn's scared of you."

Bellini nodded. "Yeah . . ." He laughed, then his face hardened. "You know something? I feel like killing someone . . . . I have an urge . . . like when I need a cigarette . . . you know?"

Burke looked at his watch. "At least this one can't go into overtime. At 6:03 it's finished."

Bellini also checked his watch. "Yeah no overtime.

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Just a two-minute warning, then a big bang, and the stadium falls down and the game is over." He laughed again, and Burke glanced at him.

The ESD climber reached the top of the shaft. He tied a nylon rope ladder to the pulley crossbearn and let the ladder fall. Bellini caught it before it hit the metal roof of the elevator. The communications man threw up a fieldphone receiver, and Bellini clipped it to the shoulder of his flak jacket. "Well, Burke . . . here goes. Once you get on the ladder, you're not getting ofl the ladder so easy." He began climbing. Burke followed, and one by one the ten ESD men climbed behind them.

Bellini paused at the oak door of the Archbishop's sacristy and put his ear to it. He heard footsteps and froze. Suddenly the crack of light at the bottom of the door disappeared. He waited several more seconds, his rifle pointed at the door and his heart pounding in his chest. The footsteps moved away. His phone clicked, and he answered it quietly. "Yeah."

The operator said, "Our people outside report all the lights are going out in there-but there's . . . like candlelight . . . maybe flares lighting up the windows."

Bellini swore. The flares, he knew, would be white phosphorus. Bastards.

Right from the beginning . . . right from the fucking beginning . . . He continued up the swaying ladder.

At the top of the shaft the climber sat on the crossbeam, pointing his light farther up, and Bellini saw a small opening where the shaft wall ended a few feet from the sloping ceiling of the triforium attic. Bellini mumbled, "Caught a fucking break at least." He stood precariously on the crossbeam, eight stories above the basement, and stretched toward the opening, grabbing at the top of the wooden wall. He pulled himself up, squeezing his head and broad shoulders into the space, a silenced pistol in his hand. He blinked in the darkness of the half attic, fully expecting to be shot between the eyes. He waited, then turned on his light, cocking his pistol at the same time. Nothing moved

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but his pounding chest against the top edge of the wall. He slid down headfirst five feet to a beam that ran over the plaster lathing, breaking his fall with his outstretched arms and righting himself silently.

Burke's head and shoulders appeared in the opening, and Bellini pulled him through. One by one the First Assault Squad dropped into the small side attic behind the triforium.

Bellini crawled over the beams, sidled up to the wooden knee-wall and moved along it until he felt a small door Stillway had described. On the other side of the door was the southeast triforium, and in the triforium, he was certain, were one or more gunmen. He put a small audio amplifier to the door and listened. He heard no footsteps, no sound of life in the triforium, but somewhere in the Cathedral a bagpipe was playing "Amazing Grace." He mumbled to himself, "Assholes."

He backed carefully away from the wall and led his squad to the low, narrow space where the sloping roof met the stone of the outside wall.

He unclipped the field phone from his jacket and spoke quietly to his switchboard below. "Report to all stations-First Squad in place. No contact."

The Second Assault Squad of ESD men climbed the rungs of the wide chimney, fire axes stung to their backs. They passed the steel door in the brick and continued up to the chimney pot.

The squad leader attached a khaki nylon rappelling line to the top rung and held the gathered rope in his hands. The cold night air blew into the chimney, making a deep, hollow, whistling sound. The squad leader stuck a periscope out of the chimney pot and scanned the towers, but the Fenians were not visible from this angle, and he pointed the scope at the cross-shaped roof. Two dormers faced him, and he saw that the hatches on them were open. "Shit." He reached back, and the squad commo man cranked the field phone slung to his chest and handed him the receiver. The squad leader reported, "Captain, Second

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Squad in position. The damned hatches are open now, and it's going to be tough crossing this roof if there're people leaning out those dormers shooting at us."

Bellini answered in a barely audible voice. "Just hold there until the towers are knocked out. Then move."

The Third Assault Squad climbed the chimney behind the Second Squad but stopped their ascent below the steel -door. The squad leader maneuvered to a position beside the door, directing a flashlight on the latch.

Slowly he reached out with a mechanical pincher and tentatively touched the latch, then drew it away. He called Bellini on the field phone.

"Captain. Third in position. Can't tell if there are alarms or mines on the door."