Uh-oh. What now? I thought.

“What is it, honey cub?” I said.

“Daddy,” Chrissy said, sobbing, “Hillary Martin said Santa can’t come to our apartment because we don’t have a fireplace. I want Santa to come.”

I smiled with relief. Maeve and I fortunately had heard this lament at least twice before and had devised a solution.

“Oh, Chrissy,” I said into the phone with mock panic. “Thank you so much for reminding me. When Santa comes to New York City, because people in a lot of apartments don’t have fireplaces, he lands his sleigh on the roof of the building and comes down the fire escape. Now, Chrissy, do me a real big favor, okay? Tell Mary Catherine to make sure the window in the kitchen is unlocked. Can you remember that?”

“I’ll tell her,” Chrissy said breathlessly.

“Wait a second. Wait, Chrissy,” I said, turning up the police radio under my dash. “Oh, wow! I just got an official report from our police helicopter. Santa’s approaching New York City right now. Quick! Get to bed, because you know what happens if Santa shows up and children are awake, right?”

“He keeps going,” Chrissy said. “Bye, Daddy.”

“Mr. Bennett?” came Mary Catherine’s voice from the receiver a few seconds later.

“Hi, Mary,” I said. “Where’s Seamus? He should have relieved you by now.”

“He did. He’s holding court in the living room with ’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”

Reading that story had always been my job, but I felt more gratitude than sadness. Despite the negatives, my grandfather Seamus was a wonderful storyteller and wouldn’t hesitate to do anything to make sure the kids were getting the best Christmas they could under the awful circumstances. At least my kids were safe, I thought. They were surrounded by angels and saints. I wished the same could be said for me, but the job I’d chosen often involved the sinners. The very worst of them.

“Please, Mary. Feel free to get out of there,” I said. “And thank you so much for picking up all the slack. When this craziness at the cathedral is over, we’ll sit down and figure out a sane schedule.”

“I’m glad I could help. You have a wonderful family,” Mary Catherine said. “Merry Christmas, Mike.”

I was speeding south past the wreath-and-holly-decked Plaza Hotel when she said it, and for a second, I wanted to believe that it could be. Then in the distance down Fifth, I spotted the harsh glow of the siege tinting the black sky.

“Talk to you later,” I said, and snapped my phone shut.

IN THE DARK CONFESSIONAL, Laura Winston lay curled on the cramped floor, sweating and shivering. The most fashionable woman on the planet, she thought, is in desperate need of a makeover.

In the twenty hours she’d been confined, she’d drifted in and out of consciousness. But ever since the dim light had retreated from the stained-glass skylight above her, six or seven hours ago, she’d been completely and atrociously awake with the fever and pain of withdrawal.

It was around noon when she had noticed her reflection in the polished brass kick plate of the door. Makeup eroded by tears and sweat, honey-blond razor cut flecked with vomit. At first Laura thought she was staring at some kind of religious carving, the image of a deranged, skeletal demon triumphantly slain by an angel. She recalled the last lines of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mirror” as she lay there, unable to look away from the terrible image. In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

It had taken a kidnapping, a violent ordeal of historic proportions to do it, but now, finally, she realized the truth.

She was old.

And she’d actually hurt people, hadn’t she? Laura thought. Women especially. Month after month after month in her magazine she’d perpetuated the hurtful myth of eternal chicness and supposedly attainable beauty. Draped impossibly expensive clothes on fourteen-year-old genetic freaks and called it normal, then implied to her readers that if they didn’t look like them, they were worthless, or at least not living up to their potential.

When she got out of this, if she did, she was going to change, she decided. Pack it in. Go to a good rehab facility. Downsize. Instead of building an empire, she was going to establish a charitable foundation. Insane as it was, this awful experience had fundamentally changed her for the better.

Give me one last chance, Lord. The fashionista prayed for the first time since she was a little girl. At least give me the chance to change.

It felt like something tore inside her ear when the gun went off just outside the confessional door.

When the ringing subsided, she could hear people screaming. The sulfurous stench of cordite wafted under the door and mixed with the sour smell of her vomit.

Her breath jammed in her throat as she heard a muffled curse and a body being dragged past her door.

God have mercy. They’d shot somebody else!

Laura felt her heart wallop against her chest.

Who could it have been? Who? Why? She hoped it wasn’t Eugena, who had been so kind to her.

The hijacking wasn’t really about money, was it? Laura concluded with numb horror. One by one, they’d be taken off to slaughter. Made to pay for their stupid, decadent sins.

She was running out of time. I’m next, Laura thought with a dry heave.

EUGENA HUMPHREY, unfortunately, had seen dead bodies before.

Her grandmother’s was the first, and she remembered how angry the withered, sadly questioning change in the face of her beloved Gram had made her. More recently, with her philanthropy work, she’d been shown pictures of atrocities throughout the world that needed somebody’s attention, and she had tried her best to help.

But even the garish images of the hacked-up villagers in equatorial Africa couldn’t prepare her for what she had just witnessed with her own eyes.

Just shot him, Eugena thought. Stepped up to the pew and just shot him through the head.

Why? How could one human being do that to another?

Now she watched the gunmen drag the body along the marble. What a horrible sound it made, like blood being squeegeed off glass. A hijacker at each side pulled at the body’s rag-doll arms as though it were some nonsensical schoolyard game.

A shiny black loafer came off one foot. Terrible detail. The open eyes of the lolling head seemed to make eye contact with Eugena as the corpse was pulled into the shadowed gallery beside the altar.

Why me? the lifeless eyes seemed to accuse her as he was pulled out of sight. Why me and not you?

They just killed my dear friend, Eugena thought, and then she began to sob uncontrollably, and she knew she would be changed forever by this.