“Very rarely, Hank,” I said.

IN HER DREAM, Laura Winston, the Vogue magazine-dubbed “Fashion Queen of the New Millennium,” was out on the lake at Ralph Lauren’s estate in northern Westchester. She was lying alone in a canoe dressed in a sheet of white muslin, and she was floating beneath a sky of bright, endless blue. The boat skimmed along the shore beneath the boughs of a stand of cherry blossom trees, and a blizzard of falling white petals, fine as angel eyelids, softly landed on her face, her throat, her breasts. When she tried to sit up in the canoe, she realized that the muslin was wrapped tightly around her arms. She was dead and in her funeral boat, she realized-and she began to scream.

Laura Winston woke with a start and banged her head hard on the wooden arm of the church pew she’d propped it against.

There was a heavy clop-clop of booted feet, and two ski-masked men with bandoliers of grenades strapped across the front of their brown robes passed slowly up the center aisle of the chapel.

What an idiot, she thought. Right now, if she had wisely begged off the funeral, she’d be thirty thousand feet above the South Caribbean in a Gulf Four, banking toward her twenty-one-million-dollar French Renaissance palace in St. Bart’s to put the finishing touches on her New Year’s Eve celebration. Giorgio, Donatella, Ralph, and Miuccia had already RSVP’d.

Instead, she had ignored that little voice, her prudent inner survivor that had piped up just the night before: Hel-lo! High-profile NYC event, neon bull’s-eye terrorist target. Stay away!

And then, of course, there was that other little secret voice that was just starting to warm up its dry, agonizing pipes.

She was out of her pills.

The OxyContin had originally been prescribed for a lower-back tennis injury. A month later, after learning that her doctor was more than willing to keep prescribing, she was taking them with her multivitamins. The ultimate energy boost, the ultimate stress eraser.

Laura didn’t want to admit it, but for about the last hour or so, she’d been jonesing. It had happened once before on a shoot that had gone a day over in Morocco. The withdrawal had started out like a tiny itch in her blood. Soon the itch got much worse, and she had started throwing up. After dry heaving for an hour or so, she couldn’t stop shaking. After ten hours, she would have gladly pulled out her own hair to make it stop. She’d managed to survive that episode with half a bottle of Valium mercifully given to her by the photographer.

But now, here, she had nothing.

Maybe some of the others had something, she thought quickly. These Hollywood types were known for their Dr. Feelgood prescriptions. She could politely inquire, couldn’t she? They were all in the same boat. Share and share alike.

No! she thought, shuddering. Her “Itness” was all she had. To lose it was simply unacceptable. No one could know about her “hillbilly heroin” addiction. She had to think. Think!

Bottom line. What did the hijackers want? Either money or some political aim, she reasoned. Either way, her being alive was important to them, wasn’t it?

What if she staged some kind of illness. A heart attack? No, all they’d have to do is take her pulse to see that she was faking. What other kinds of medical emergencies did people suddenly suffer from? Diabetic fits, panic attacks?

That was it! A panic attack! Wouldn’t have to fake too hard there, either. She was already sweating; her heartbeat was elevated.

Withdrawal hidden in a panic attack. A brilliant plan that would salvage her potentially billion-dollar reputation. Worst case, she’d be separated from the rest of the celebs to vomit in peace.

Laura Winston relaxed her resistance against her shaking, and went with it.

EUGENA HUMPHREY WAS so deeply zoned into her soothing Pranayama yoga breathing that at first she didn’t even notice when Laura Winston stood up. Eugena’s breath escaped from the high part of her lungs in a definitively non-Tantric gush when the elegant fashion guru suddenly started moaning like a rabid squirrel.

A second ago, the fashion diva had been sleeping blissfully. Now, with her pasty face and her exquisitely colored hair in a rat’s nest, she looked like she might have been sleepwalking. Except that her eyes were open.

“Sit down, Laura,” Eugena said. “You saw what happened to Mercedes. These men aren’t playin’.”

Eugena tugged the hem of the fashionista’s butter-soft black suede Chanel skirt.

“Get your hands OFF ME!” Laura Winston screamed.

Hysterical, Eugena thought. She had to calm the woman down before she got herself killed.

“Laura, what’s wrong?” Eugena said as calmly as she could. “Just talk to me. It’s okay. I can help you.”

“I can’t TAKE IT!” Laura yelled, jogging out into the aisle. “HELP ME, PLEASE! Pleeeeeaaaaase! SOMEBODY!”

The short, stocky lead hijacker appeared by the rail as Laura dropped, wailing, to her knees.

“We can’t have her bugging out like this,” he called to Little John across the chapel. “Take care of her.”

The extra-large hijacker stepped over and lifted Laura up from the marble floor by her lapels.

“Ma’am? You’ll have to get back in your seat,” he said.

“PLEASE HELP ME!” she yelled after a loud, rattling sob. “You can help me, can’t you, please? I can’t breathe. My chest. I need air. So hot in here. I need to go to a hospital.”

“To Bellevue maybe,” the big hijacker said with a chuckle. “Ma’am, you’re hysterical. The only way I know how to deal with hysterical people is to slap them. You don’t want to get slapped, do you?”

The hijacker grabbed the middle-aged woman by her wrist when she tried to bolt past him. He turned her bony arm around behind her, then took her by the back of her haute couture top and led her out beyond the rail.

“If that’s the way you want to play it,” Little John said, shaking his head.

Next to an enormous statue of Jesus in Mary’s lap, he opened up a confessional door. He pushed the now screaming Laura Winston inside. When she tried to rush out, he put a combat boot to her chest, sent her flying, and slammed the door shut.

“Jeez,” Little John said, shaking his head at the other hostages. “Some people, huh?”

SECONDS LATER, as Little John strutted down the center aisle like a conquering hero, comedian John Rooney lost it. Being forced to idly watch the gunmen abuse Laura Winston had set some deep chord within Rooney humming. He forgot about his safety, about the resistance plan, about the police outside. He just sprang up from his seat and jumped the hijacker.

Little John stumbled and dropped when Rooney slammed into the back of his knees. Rooney then managed to wrap an arm around his neck and squeeze with every ounce of his pent-up fear and rage.

Rooney was still on top of Little John when the other gunmen started kicking him. Steel-toed boots struck his shoulder, his neck, his forehead. Instead of letting go, he closed his eyes and concentrated on one thing: the pressure of his arm on the hijacker’s windpipe.

The kicking stopped suddenly. Then Rooney heard a metallic snapping and felt something cold and hard press against his temple.

He opened one of his eyes and saw Jack, the lead hijacker, smiling at him from the opposite end of an M16.

“I’m only going to ask you once,” Jack said. “Let him go.”

“Shoot me!” Rooney found himself saying. Adrenaline burned like acid in his blood. “I’m not going to sit and watch you animals beat up on old people and women!”