“Little hot in there, isn’t it, hardass?” Jack said through the membrane of plastic near Conlan’s ear.

Conlan gagged. His throat was burning up. Oh God, Christ, no. Not like this.

Jack sat down, yawned, and crossed his legs as Conlan convulsed. After an eternity, Jack checked his watch.

“You want to sign up for my cash-for-oxygen program?” he asked. “Up to you.”

Plastic crackled in Conlan’s ears as he nodded vigorously.

Jack reached across the table, and air, sweet air, rushed in around his gloved finger as he poked a small hole in the bag.

“I thought the Beatles were an influence of yours, Charlie,” Jack said, smiling as he drummed his fingers on the table. “C’mon. Don’t you remember? ‘The best things in life are free’?”

Conlan gasped and wheezed with his head down against the table. The clipboard was slid beside his chin. A pen landed on top of it.

Two thoughts pounded through Conlan’s brain with the returning oxygen. The first was a prayer. The second a curse.

My God.

We’re completely fucked.

I HAD JUST GOTTEN OFF the phone with Maeve, and I was thinking, I needed to hear her voice even more than she needed to hear from me.

Just then, Steve Reno sauntered into the command trailer carrying a cardboard box of sandwiches and coffee. He gave me one of the coffees along with a handshake.

I remembered Steve from several standoffs. Like most of the top cops in the NYPD, the tall, long-haired, muscular tactical officer was kind of an anomaly. No one was more patient and compassionate on the outside of a barricaded door-and no one was quicker when it had to be kicked in. Steve Reno was definitely a mystery man. Three wives so far, five kids, lived in SoHo but drove a pickup truck with a Semper Fi sticker on the rear window.

Behind him were two FBI commandos in black SWAT fatigues. The shorter of the two could have been a plumber, or a shop teacher, except for the bright green eyes that scanned the trailer and me with the efficient sweep of a copying machine light bar.

“Mike, this is Dave Oakley from HRT,” Steve told me. “The greatest tactical team supervisor alive.”

“Let’s just keep it that way, huh, Steve? No mess-ups today,” the commando said with a gruff, humorless laugh as I shook his callused hand. “What’s the story with our new best friends inside?”

I filled him in as best I could. The only change in the commando’s expression was a compression of his lips when I mentioned the explosives. He nodded quietly when I was done.

“We got our work cut out for us today,” Reno finally said. “We already spoke to Secret Service. President Hopkins told them the remaining hostages are being held in the Lady Chapel at the far rear of the church. He said that in addition to being extremely calm, the kidnappers aren’t taking an iota of shit from any of the captives. They seemed trained, well disciplined. They’re not terrorists. They’re American, apparently. New one to me.”

“New one to all of us,” I said as the door opened again behind Reno.

Another baseball-hat-wearing ESU cop came in with an elderly man in a tweed cap. The old man was carrying a large cardboard cylinder. What the hell was this all about?

“I’m Mike Nardy, the cathedral’s caretaker,” he said, popping open the cylinder’s lid. “The rectory told me to bring these here.”

I helped him unroll the blueprints. The paper was old, yellowed at the edges, but the detailing of the cathedral was extensive. I used a couple of chattering radios to hold it open as Reno, Oakley, and Commander Will Matthews leaned over to look.

The overhead view of St. Patrick’s Cathedral looked like a cross. The main Fifth Avenue entrance was at the bottom of the long piece, and the 50th and 51st Street entryways at the sides of the shorter one. The Lady Chapel, like a small extension at the top of the long part of the cross, had no way in or out.

“I got snipers in Saks on Forty-ninth and in 620 Fifth behind us,” said Oakley. “I’ll have to get one on Madison at the rear to watch the Lady Chapel. Too bad these damn stained-glass windows are about as clear as a brick wall. Mr. Nardy, it’s hard to tell from these schematics. Is there a clear line of sight from the rose window here in the front to the Lady Chapel in the rear?”

“In part,” the serious old man said with a curious squint of his face. “Though there are columns along the back of the altar and a fifty-seven-foot baldachin, that’s a bronze gazebo-type structure, over the altar.”

“The cathedral’s a block long. What’s that, five hundred feet?” Oakley said to his second-in-command. “We do our reconnaissance. Fiber-optic camera through one of those windows, maybe. Get heat signatures of the weapons to pick out the bad guys. Time’s right, we rappel down the front edifice, blow the rose window and all the chapel windows simultaneously.”

“I know I must be going a little deaf,” the caretaker, Nardy, said to Oakley. “Because for a second there, I thought you said you were going to destroy the great rose window of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.”

“You don’t have to concern yourself with police business, Mr. Nardy, is it?” Oakley said. “Lives are on the line. We’ll do what we have to do.”

“That rose window is a hundred and fifty years old, sir,” the caretaker said, folding his stick-thin arms. “It’s irreplaceable, as are the windows of the Lady Chapel and every other of the cathedral’s last artifacts and statues. You wouldn’t be so quick to blow a hole in the side of the Statue of Liberty, would you? Well, this church is this city’s Statue of Faith, so you better come up with some other plan. You’ll destroy it over my dead body.”

“Remove Mr. Nardy, somebody, please,” Oakley said, annoyed.

“You better listen to me!” Nardy said forcefully as the ESU cop escorted him back outside. “I’ll go right to the press.”

That’s all we needed, wasn’t it? I thought. Another challenge, another messy obstacle. This thing wasn’t hard enough without having our hands tied behind our backs.

Oakley turned his black baseball hat around on his head. He looked like a catcher who’d missed the throw to second on a steal as he exhaled loudly into his cupped hands.

“Jesus, would you look at this clambake?” Oakley said. “The granite walls are what? Two feet thick? The doors are foot-thick bronze. I don’t think we’ve ever tried to breach either a door that big, or one made of bronze.

“Even the precious windows have stone tracery. There’s no adjoining buildings we can try to tunnel our way in from. This place is a fortress. St. Pat’s is probably the best place in this city to hold off an army. And we have to infiltrate it without blowing it up or leaving a scratch. Would somebody please remind me why I took this job?”

“The fat sneaker contracts and the book deals,” I said. “Just like the rest of us.”

It was a lame joke, but under the circumstances I didn’t need to be Billy Crystal to provide an outlet for the mounting stress. Everyone, including the stoic Oakley, got a pretty good laugh.

It was either that or cry.