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?”