Steve was right. These hijackers were acting like we didn’t exist. They were acting the way a kidnapper in a concealed location would-not like ten to a dozen guys surrounded by a battalion of heavily armed law enforcement, NYPD, and FBI.

“Let’s get some people in here to start calling those numbers and get this thing organized,” Commander Will Matthews said. “And give that account number to the Bureau. See if maybe they can get a lead for us.”

I closed my eyes and tapped the cell phone against my head in order to jolt something loose. Nothing was coming, so I checked my watch. Mistake. Only four hours had passed. Based on how completely exhausted I felt, I would have guessed it was four weeks.

Somebody handed me a coffee. There were cartoon reindeer and a smiling Santa on the paper cup. For a moment, I thought of how nice it would be when I finally got home. Christmas music playing softly as Maeve directed our ten elves in decorating the tree.

Then I remembered there was no tree.

And no Maeve.

I put the cup of coffee down and picked up one of the printouts of the demands, my fingers shaking slightly as they went down the list of contact numbers.

The great and glorious NYPD-acting as messengers.

JOHN ROONEY LIFTED his chin off his hands when something hard poked into his ribs. He glanced over and saw Little John, holding out his billy club.

“Hey, prima donna,” he said. “I’m getting bored. Time for you to get up on that altar and give us a little holiday entertainment. Whattaya say, guy?”

“I’m really not in the mood,” Rooney said, dropping his head back down.

Rooney’s teeth clicked together loudly when Little John gave him a love tap on the chin with the end of the club.

“Here’s your motivation,” Little John said. “Get up there and make me laugh like a hyena. Or I’ll shatter your Oscar-nominated skull open.”

My God, Rooney thought as he arrived up on the altar and stared out at the other hostages. Some of them were still crying. Just about every face was filled with wide-eyed terror.

Talk about a hard crowd to work. Plus, he hadn’t done stand-up since he’d broke into film eight years ago. And even then, all his jokes had been rehearsed ad nauseam in front of the bathroom mirror of his studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.

Little John, sitting in the back row, made a c’mon gesture with his baton.

What the hell could be funny about any of this? But what choice did he have?

“Hey, everybody,” Rooney tried. “Thanks for coming this morning. Heeere’s Johnny!”

He heard somebody, a woman, give a real laugh. Who was that? It was Eugena Humphrey. Good for her!

Then Rooney felt something in him flick like a circuit breaker.

“Eugena, hey, how YOU doin’, honey chile,” he said, mimicking the opening tagline from her morning show. She really started cracking up now, along with a few more people. Charlie Conlan was grinning broadly.

Rooney faked checking his watch.

“Talk about a long frickin’ Mass,” he said.

There were more laughs.

“You know what I really hate?” Rooney said, stalking back and forth now in front of the altar. “Don’t you just hate it when you go to a friend’s funeral and you get kidnapped?”

Rooney chuckled along with the cackles, maximizing the pause for effect. He was rolling pretty good now. He could feel it all through his nervous system.

“I mean, there you are, all dressed up, a little sad about the person gone-but a little happy that it’s not you, then wham! Wouldn’t you know it? The monks at the altar whip out sawed-off shotguns and grenades.”

Almost everybody was laughing now. Even a few of the hijackers in the back were cracking up. The laughter rolled like a wave off the stone walls.

Rooney started doing a Gregorian chant and then imitated whipping out a gun. He made a terrified face and ran and hid behind the altar. “Here, take my diamond earrings so I can jet,” he said, imitating Mercedes Freer to a tee. Then he rolled around on the marble floor, holding his face and whining like a hurt Chihuahua.

When he glanced at the crowd, he could see smiles everywhere. At least his routine was relaxing everyone a little. At the back of the chapel, he spotted Little John doubled over, holding his sides.

Keep laughing, asshole, Rooney thought, getting up off his knees. I got a million of ’em. Wait’ll you hear the one about the kidnapper getting the electric chair.

FROM THE BACK of the chapel, former rock-and-roller Charlie Conlan pretended to laugh at John Rooney’s shtick as he studied the hijackers one by one.

There were six of the jackals along the rear rail of the chapel. The big one, Little John, was there, but the leader, Jack, along with another five or six others, seemed to be away somewhere else in the church.

As the rest of the hostages continued to laugh at Rooney, Conlan did his best to recall some of his army training. He counted the grenades on the kidnappers’ chests, eyed the guns they carried, the batons, the bulge at the waist of their robes where bulletproof vests seemed to end.

He slid a couple of feet to the left in his pew, nothing too obvious, nothing to draw any attention.

“Todd,” he whispered.

“What’s up?” the New York Giants football star murmured near his ear.

“Is Brown with us?” The real estate tycoon was a big man, in his fifties, who looked to be in pretty good shape.

“He’s psyched,” the athlete said. “He talked to Rubenstein. Rubenstein’s going to try to get the mayor on board.”

Conlan was glad the quarterback was with them. Out of all of them, the six-four, two-hundred-thirty-pound athlete had the best shot at physically overpowering one of the hijackers.

“That’s progress,” Conlan said to Snow out of the corner of his mouth. “With Rooney, that makes at least five of us. The more, the better our chances.”

“What’s our move?” the quarterback asked.

“This is between me and you for now. You know how they frisked us? Took away our cell phones and wallets?” Conlan said.

He paused as Rooney told another joke.

“They missed the.twenty-two in my boot,” Conlan whispered.

There, he’d said it, he thought. He didn’t have a gun, but survival meant keeping up people’s spirits, keeping them hopeful and motivated to act when the time was right.

Conlan glanced up at the altar when he heard more applause. Rooney was taking a bow now. The show was over.

“We’ve got a shot,” the quarterback said through the clapping. “Say the word. We go. We roll.”

THE NEAT MAN WINCED as he probed a gloved hand behind the pay phone in the kiosk on the northwest corner of 51st and Madison. The sour reek of stale urine rising from the phone’s pedestal teared his eyes as he groped around blindly. Where the hell was the device?

Of all the places to set up a rendezvous, he thought as his fingers finally, mercifully found the plastic-coated wire behind the steel box.

Yet another bullet point in their plan, he noted as he clipped a phone company dial set across the pair of hidden colored wires. Three weeks before, his boys had actually snaked a pair of phone lines through a street duct in the rectory basement, into the corner phone company manhole, and, from the manhole, up the pay phone duct here to the street. Anticipating that all cell phone and landline transmissions in and out of the church would be monitored, they had created their own undocumented line.

The Neat Man checked his watch as he lifted the dial set to his ear.

At exactly 6:00 p.m., there was a crackle as one of the hijackers inside St. Patrick’s attached a simple nine-volt battery to the opposite end of the line, powering it. Instead of going high tech, they had outwitted the dopes by going low tech. He had every angle covered, right through to the dramatic climax and escape, which, he had to admit, was a real doozy.