“Believe it,” I hollered at him. “Police are on their way. Lock down your office, and tell your security chief to keep Mooney out of the building at all costs. He’s armed, and we think he might have explosives.”

WE WERE SCREECHING off the West Side Highway at 23rd in Chelsea when Emily received a call on her Fed phone. We were directed to an ugly beige-brick high-rise around the corner from Eighth Avenue and 25th Street.

As we swerved down into its underground garage, a large, dirty white box truck flashed its lights at us. Emily stopped behind the truck’s graffiti-covered back gate.

The gate rolled up, revealing a spotless interior filled with racks of computer servers and screens. It seemed like every inch of the walls was layered in cables for the very complicated-looking electronics equipment. What was most surprising by far, though, were the half dozen men dressed in tactical black, securing submachine guns on a bench along both walls. They completely ignored us as they busily tightened the snaps and clips on their various weapons and gear.

“HRT’s Mobile Tactical Operations Center,” Emily explained as we climbed in. “State-of-the-art surveillance setup and command center rolled into one. There’s fiber-optic cameras and boom microphones, as well as audio and visual com links to all the forward sniper observers.”

“Welcome to your Homeland Security dollars hard at work,” a handsome young Asian agent said as he flipped up his ballistic goggles and gave Emily a quick fist tap.

“Mike, meet Tom Chow. He’s head of HRT two,” Emily said.

Chow pointed to a computer screen showing a two-story brick town house.

“Thar she blows,” he said. “We’ve been here about half an hour, and there’s been no movement in or out. We can’t confirm if he’s inside.”

From beside the computer, Chow lifted up some photographs of Mooney’s building taken from various overhead angles.

“We figure we have two breach points, the roof and the front door,” he said, pointing them out. “See this other taller building to the east alongside? That’s a warehouse. We already have a team up there ready to fast-rope down to Mooney’s roof deck and gain entry. Sniper observers across the street will cover the windows so the rest of us, the breach team, can blow the front door. EMS is around on Tenth, ready to come in once we locate the kid.”

Chow turned as an oversized NYPD van pulled in behind our car. A black Labrador wagged its tail on the front seat between two cops wearing bulky gray bombproof suits.

“Hey, now,” Chow said. “Even the Bomb Squad is here. Time to get this party started.”

Chow pulled a ringing cell phone from his fatigues a moment later. He listened briefly. He was smiling as he shut it. He lowered his goggles and pounded on the tinted Plexiglas that separated the back of the assault truck from its cab.

“That’s the green light, people. We got it. Roll this sister.”

Emily and I strapped on borrowed vests as the truck’s back gate rolled down. My stomach rolled, too, as the truck suddenly lurched forward up the ramp.

A split second later, the truck came to a whiplash-inducing stop. Its back door went up like a snapped shade, and the FBI commandos sprinted out onto the street toward the town house. Faster than they could ring the doorbell, a charge was placed by the knob, and Mooney’s door blew back into the house with a low thump.

Two men in black rappelled off the building beside the town house as the commandos on the street rushed into it behind their Heckler and Koch MP5s.

In a chaos of radio chatter and shouts, I followed them over the sidewalk with my Glock drawn. Emily was right on my heels with a Remington shotgun.

“Please be home, fucker,” she said at my back as we ran.

“Yes, fucker,” I agreed. “Please, pretty please, be home.”

AS THE DOOR to his town house was being blown into tiny pieces, Francis X. Mooney stopped on the corner of Park Avenue sixty blocks to the northeast and set down his bag.

He turned toward the four-story Gothic school building that took up most of the north side of 85th Street between Park and Lexington. It was St. Edward’s Academy, the elite private school he had attended from seventh grade through senior year.

He was filthy from his scuffle, wet from the rain, and completely exhausted from the walk, but he’d made it, hadn’t he?

He’d come back full circle to the place where it had all begun.

He stood for a second, remembering his first day here. He’d stood in this same spot, sick and frozen, with the scholarship-kid certainty that his clothes, his face, and every other inch of his being wouldn’t be up to snuff.

He quickly removed the Beretta from the valise and tucked it into the waistband of his trousers and smoothed his jacket over it.

The butterflies never changed, he thought, finally hefting his case with a swallow of his dry throat.

Just the reasons.

I can’t do this, he thought.

I must do this, he thought.

“Francis? Francis, is that you?”

Francis turned. A tall, lean black man about his age was stopped beside him, smiling. He wore a St. Edward’s ball cap and held a takeout bag.

“Do I know you?” Francis said.

“I hope so. It’s me, Jerry Webb. We were on varsity together, class of ’sixty-five. It’s actually Coach Webb now. I was in finance for a while, but then I came back to good old St. Ed’s to teach them how to play a little ball. Can you imagine? I can’t sometimes, especially when I get my paycheck.”

“Oh, my God. Jerry. Yes,” Francis said, recovering. He found himself smiling genuinely as he shook the tall man’s hand. They actually had been teammates. If you could really call them that. Webb had been their all-city starting power forward, while Francis had had to practically kill himself every practice just for the privilege of riding the bench.

“It’s been-,” Francis began.

“Too long,” Coach Webb said with a wink. “Ol’ Francis X. Blast from the past. I knew that was you. Not too old yet to pick an old teammate out of a crowd. Can you still drive to your left like a banshee, ma man?”

Francis’s smile immediately dissipated. He’d never been able to go to his left. It was the first string’s running joke. Had Webb been one of the ones in that incident at summer practice? Francis went over the still-raw forty-year-old memory. He nodded to himself. Indeed, he had.

“What brings you around?” the still-cocky bastard wanted to know as he gave Francis the once-over. “You’re looking a little ruffled.”

How polite of you to notice, Francis thought.

“I had an appointment with a law client around the corner. First, I slipped getting out of my taxi, then I got caught in the rain, and then the guy bailed on me,” Francis lied. “Long story short, not my day. I thought, since I was in the neighborhood, I might stick my head in the door to check on the application of one of my friends’ kids.”

“Oh, I know how that goes,” Coach Webb said. “One tradition about St. Ed’s that remains unchanged. It never seems to get any easier to get into, does it? Let’s walk in together.”

The flat-topped middle-aged guard behind the arched glass doors immediately buzzed them in when he spotted the coach. Francis swallowed again as he stepped inside. This was the hard part coming up. He hadn’t had time to do reconnaissance, and he wasn’t sure if his flimsy excuse would hold water.

“He’s with me, Tommy,” Coach Webb said, signing them both into the security register. “This here’s Francis X., a valued alum. He’s got very important business at Admissions. I’ll walk him there myself.”

“No problem, Coach,” the guard said with a thumbs-up.

Francis wiped his brow as they walked down the locker-lined hallway. He glanced into classrooms as they passed. He started to panic. What the hell? They were all empty.