THE NOON ANGELUS bells started tolling from the cathedral as we carried the mayor of New York down the front steps. Everything that had happened up until now paled in comparison to this brutal, horrifying, and unnecessary murder.

There was an instant hush in the crowd of law enforcement. The bell continued its ominous pealing as the police and emergency personnel we passed in the cordoned-off street either gaped, goggle-eyed, or stiffened in ramrod postures of respect.

Cold violently kneaded my stomach as I remembered how police and firemen stopped and stood in the same reverential way in the WTC rubble whenever a service member was brought out of the pile. I looked up at Rock Center ’s glorious seventy-foot Christmas tree right after we laid the slain mayor on an EMS stretcher.

The hits just kept on coming, didn’t they?

Enough, I thought. What the hijackers had done was precedent-setting in the savage department, but I had to get myself beyond shock. It was time to put up the wall and focus. Get out ahead of this thing. Figure Jack out somehow.

Why the mayor? I thought, staring again at his badly tortured body.

Was Jack so overwrought by the death of one of his fellow hijackers that he’d chosen the mayor as the one victim who would make us the angriest? Or was the whole thing another ploy to push our buttons, to get us to react in a certain way? Was this murder actually a clue for us? Our first? Why did they pick Andrew Thurman as the one to die?

As I was trying to figure it out, a captain from Midtown North came down between the white wicker angels and rows of poinsettias and grabbed me. Borough Commander Will Matthews had moved the command center to an office in 630 Fifth, the Rockefeller Center building to the west, directly across from the cathedral. He wanted me to report there immediately.

I ran all the way, and I don’t know what I expected when I stepped into the boardroom of the second-floor office-but it wasn’t that Commander Will Matthews would be the lowest-ranking cop in the room.

Normally, I would have been a little rattled to receive NYPD Police Commissioner Daly’s curt nod of hello a second before Bill Gant’s, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s New York office. But my shock reserve was bone-dry that afternoon. I just nodded back at both of them.

“Afternoon, Detective,” the commissioner said.

He was tall, aristocratically handsome, and seemed more like a banker than a cop in his broad pinstripe navy suit. Some said, with his tailored clothes and his Columbia MBA, he was just another glory hound, far removed from the rank and file. This was the first time I’d gotten close enough to make any kind of judgment.

“We just heard about the… my God, I can’t believe I’m saying this… Andy’s… I mean, the mayor’s murder,” Daly stammered. He seemed genuinely upset, and that touched me. “You’ve been speaking to the individuals responsible. What do you think this is all about?”

“Frankly, sir,” I said, “I can’t get a bead on them. It looked like a straight-up money deal, at first. A group of professional criminals trying to pull off an audacious mass kidnapping.

“But then, for some unknown reason, they shot a priest. I guess you could chalk up shooting the tactical team officers to defense, but what they did to the mayor shows a great degree of rage. Maybe at first it was for money, but now, since they see how surrounded they are, they’re losing it.”

“Do you think all or a part of this might have had something to do with a personal grudge against the mayor?” Gant asked. With his basset-hound eye bags, the short FBI chief looked like the antonym of Daly. Pudgy and pale in a dark Sears single-breasted suit, Gant could have been a bartender at a funeral.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s possible.”

“You don’t know too much, do you?” Gant came right back at me.

“You think I volunteered for this detail?” I said, unclipping the crisis phone off my belt and sliding it across the boardroom table at him. “Be my guest, pal. Step right up. You guys sure showed ’em how it was done down in Waco.”

And minutes before, I’d thought I was in a place beyond anger. I guess not.

“I’m sorry,” Gant said, backing away from the crisis phone as if it might bite him. “That was a cheap shot.”

“Yes, it was,” the commissioner said, eyeing the FBI leader like he was looking for a soft place to hit him with a billy club. “Detective Bennett is going above and beyond in this case, and he’s staying on it. Is that clear?”

Screw what they said about the commissioner putting on airs, I thought, hiding a smile. They were wrong.

Gant looked taken aback, but he nodded agreement. A second later, Gant’s phone rang. He shot out of his chair and into the hall after he looked at the caller ID.

He came back a moment later with an even paler look on his face. “That was the director. He just got off the horn with the president. Military intervention has been authorized. Delta Force has been mobilized and is en route.”

I WAS STILL trying to come to terms with what I’d just heard as I staggered out of the boardroom inside Rockefeller Center. I’d been on some big cases before, but this was the first time I’d heard war declared.

Just when I thought things couldn’t escalate any further, I saw that the whole of the command center operation had been moved into the hallway for more space. I spotted my fellow NYPD negotiator, Ned Mason, placing a sheet of computer paper up on a corkboard filled with them. The FBI negotiator, Paul Martelli, was on the phone at a desk beside him.

“So it’s true? Thurman is dead?” Mason asked. I’d noticed that he always needed to know what was going on, to be in the loop.

I nodded solemnly. “He was dead when they threw him out on the street.”

Mason looked like a brick had just hit him in the face as he nodded back.

“How could this be happening here?” Martelli said. He looked shocked, too. “ Russia. Baghdad, maybe. But Midtown Manhattan? Jesus. Hasn’t this city been through enough?”

“Apparently not,” I said. “How’s the money-gathering going?”

“We’re getting there,” Mason said, gesturing toward the papers on the board. Each one indicated an individual hostage, their representative, and the amount of the ransom.

“I just got off the horn with Eugena Humphrey’s people in LA,” he said. “In addition to Eugena’s ransom, they’re going to put up the money for the two reverends inside as well.”

“That’s generous,” I said.

“If only the rest of them could be that cooperative,” Mason continued. “Rooney’s business manager refuses to release any money until he personally speaks with one of the hostage-takers. When I told him that was impossible, he hung up and is now refusing to take my calls. Can you believe it? It’s like he thinks he’s negotiating a contract instead of taking his client’s life out of danger. Oh, and one of Charlie Conlan’s kids has started legal action to block the transfer of any funds. The asshole’s argument is that maybe his father is already dead, and he’s refusing to put his inheritance in jeopardy.”

“Family values at work,” I said.

“You said it,” Martelli agreed.

“How much do we have collected so far?” I asked.

“Sixty-six million in escrow,” Mason said, after punching buttons on a desk calculator. “Another ten makes seventy-six, and we’ll be ready to wire it.”

“Did you subtract the mayor’s ransom?” I said.

Mason’s eyes widened as he looked up at me. “You’re right. Okay. Take away his three million, the total goes from seventy-six to seventy-three. Only seven million dollars to go.”

“Only,” I said. “You know you’ve been hanging out with the rich and famous too long when you use the word only before the words seven million dollars.”