Nor was Karp going to give in now on the idea of beefing up security. It wasn’t that he was oblivious to the threats or trying to be a hero, but Karp wasn’t going to let his personal safety affect how he ran the office and his life. Nor did he think it would save him if he did. As he’d explained to Clay Fulton, the NYPD detective sergeant who was in charge of the detectives assigned as investigators to the DAO as well as Karp’s security, and to Murrow just a few days earlier, “If someone really wants to get at me, they’re going to do it. We take reasonable measures to prevent any incidents, but we all know from experience that a determined assassin will find a way to strike.”
Karp was not as matter-of-fact about the security for his twin boys, his daughter, and Marlene. However, even there he had limited control because of the rather unique makeup of his nuclear family.
Marlene, a former ADA herself who’d started the office’s sex crimes unit, was tough as nails. She had turned in her prosecutor’s badge to start a firm that provided VIP security services. Ultimately, the firm became highly successful and was purchased by a publicly held operation for millions. Lately, experiencing an apparent midlife crisis, she’d started taking on special cases in which her talent as a private investigator, as well as her law degree, were needed. Over the years, including “volunteer” work protecting abused women from brutal spouses and boyfriends, she’d shown a surprising proclivity for meeting violence with violence and coming out the winner. So when he’d mentioned the idea of increasing police protection for her and their children, she’d scoffed.
“I’m quite capable of taking care of myself,” she noted pointedly-she’d barely managed to shoehorn some of her dealings with abusers and other miscreants into the strict confines of the law. “I’ve made plenty of enemies in this world without worrying about a few more nutcases. And even if they are dangerous, I’m probably more aware of my surroundings and potential threats than my dear, but somewhat naive, husband, and he won’t allow any extra security for himself. And to be honest, I certainly don’t want to rely on some cop watching my back; it might give me a false sense of security, trusting someone I don’t know. So I’ll watch my own, thank you very much.”
Karp had no more luck with his daughter, Lucy. But considering that she and her fiance, Ned Blanchett, worked for a secretive “off-the-books” antiterrorism agency that exposed them to grave danger on a regular basis, there was no reason to think that an NYPD officer or two was going to make much of a difference.
In fact, Lucy and Ned, who made their home in Taos, New Mexico, were in town on assignment for the agency, which was run by an old family friend and former FBI agent, Espey Jaxon. They’d had dinner with the family and spent the night in Lucy’s childhood bedroom. Karp had heard them stirring before dawn and got up, catching them heading out the door with to-go cups of coffee.
“Off to a boring ol’ meeting,” Lucy said unconvincingly. “We should be home by dinner, but if not, don’t wait and don’t worry.”
When the door closed, he’d walked into the kitchen to check out the television monitor mounted in a corner that was connected to a security camera above the outside door. He shook his head when a black sedan with tinted windows pulled up to the curb and the two young people got in and then sped off into the dark. Boring ol’ meeting, my ass, he thought. He’d already been filled in on the events transpiring that morning by Jaxon, but he knew that his daughter and future son-in-law were precluded from discussing it and he honored their silence.
That left the twin boys-Zak and Giancarlo-to worry about. The problem with them was that they were in high school and, as with any teenagers, they liked their freedom and sense of independence. They were active, involved in sports, the music scene in the Lower East Side, and whatever else two teens who considered Manhattan their playground might be up to at any given time. When he’d suggested that a plainclothes police officer be assigned to tag along “discreetly and at a distance” until after the Ellis trial, they’d complained mightily, saying, “a cop would cramp our style.” They threatened to “ditch the tail” as soon as possible.
“I’m not worried about a bunch of crazies; I’ll club them with this,” said Zak, the larger and more rambunctious of the two. He sounded disturbingly like his mother as he raised his right hand, which was in a cast due to his having broken it punching a larger, older upperclassmate who was bullying his brother and another player on their high school baseball team.
So for the time being, Karp had let it be. The truth was that while the biblical verses about God’s wrath were thinly disguised threats, they were no more alarming-indeed, quite a bit less alarming-than others the Karp-Ciampi clan had dealt with in the past. Because of his job the family was a magnet for trouble. They had been fending off a variety of sociopaths, terrorists, and other assorted killers and thugs since he and Marlene had met at the DAO and started dating. Marlene had even lost an eye opening a letter bomb intended for him before they were married and had kids. Lucy’s version of all these events was that the family had a spiritual calling to battle the “forces of evil.”
“We better get going,” Murrow said, standing up.
Karp looked at his watch-it was almost eight o’clock-and nodded. “Sure, let’s roll,” he said, pulling on an off-the-rack blue suit jacket.
3
Lucy Karp noted the look of surprise on the terrorists’ faces after they burst into the pilothouse and the crew hardly reacted except to cast hard glances at them before going about their business. Only the captain said anything, which was, “Go to hell.” He muttered the sentiment with his back turned to them.
The crew members were not the only other people in the pilothouse. Besides Lucy, there were the two young men who’d been standing in line-agents for USNIDSA, the United States National Inter-Departmental Security Administration, which her agency had teamed with for this operation. They both had their guns trained on the intruders, identified at the morning’s briefing as Aman Ghilzai and Hasim Akhund.
“Drop your weapons!” the lead agent demanded as he sighted down the barrel of his gun at Ghilzai’s forehead.
“Girnaa aap ka bandooq!” Lucy said, repeating the command in Urdu.
Swift as a cobra the terrorist pointed his gun at Lucy and pulled the trigger. His face registered surprise again when there was an empty click but no loud report and no bullet left the barrel.
Ghilzai dropped the gun and reached for the cord hanging from the faux life preserver to detonate the C4 explosives packed inside and spew ball bearings and fire throughout the pilothouse. He braced himself for the expected flash that would carry him off to his reward, but his path to martyrdom took a detour when his weapon failed him again.
“Maghloob ho jana,” Lucy yelled. “Surrender!”
Ghilzai sneered at her. “I speak good English, randi.”
“Well then next time you call me a whore, I’m going to slap that ugly mustache off your ignorant face,” Lucy replied.
The agent next to her smiled. “Sorry about that, asshole,” he said scathingly to Ghilzai. “The bomb’s a fake and the guns are loaded with dummies. You and your pal are my prisoners.”
Ghilzai wasn’t just some poorly prepared, brainwashed recruit from New Jersey. As they’d been told at the briefing that morning after she and Ned left her parents’ loft, he had been trained at a top-notch al-Qaeda camp in Pakistan. “Remember, he is able and dedicated, and he will be determined to carry out his mission,” Jaxon had said. “When he realizes the mission has been compromised, he will adjust and try to kill as many Americans as he can. Precautions have been taken, but that doesn’t rule out some surprise. Be careful.”
Suddenly, the second terrorist screamed something incoherent, dropped his gun, and started to run from the room. But he only reached the doorway before he was knocked back onto the deck of the pilothouse, where he lay clutching his midsection and gasping for air. A bronze-skinned man wearing a ferry company uniform stepped in behind the downed man, followed by a
tourism volunteer named Tran, according to his name tag.
Lucy tried to smile when she saw her fellow agents John Jojola and Tran Vinh Do enter the room, but it was a weak attempt. She’d known that the guns the terrorists were going to “find” in the life preservers wouldn’t be loaded. Still, it had been unnerving to have one pointed at her head and to hear the sound of the hammer striking the shell. She felt nauseous and dizzy, so she concentrated on the bantering between Jojola and Tran.
“Jojola! I thought we agreed that I would get first shot at these guys if they made a run for it,” Tran complained. “Tham lam lon!”
“He just called you a greedy pig,” Lucy said, relieved to have something to take her mind off the incident. A super-polyglot, she had a savant’s ear and tongue for languages, more than five dozen of them by last count. She’d learned Vietnamese, which Tran had used to insult Jojola, by age twelve.
“I understood him, Lucy,” Jojola replied dryly. “My Vietnamese may be rusty but I heard enough versions of that back in ’68 to last me a lifetime, so I knew what the ngu ngoc khi was saying.”
“What the hell?” said the lead NIDSA agent, pointing his gun at Ghilzai while his partner handcuffed Akhund, who was still trying to catch his breath from a blow to the solar plexus.
“He,” Lucy said, pointing to Jojola, “just called him”-she pointed at Tran-“a ‘stupid monkey.’ It’s a pretty typical insult in Vietnam.”
The lead agent’s jaw dropped and then he scowled. “I could give a rat’s ass what they’re calling each other.”
“This is what we get working with amateurs and old men,” added the second agent, placing flex cuffs on the downed terrorist’s wrists.
Jojola and Tran stopped their squabbling to look hard at the agent who’d insulted them.
“Amateurs and old men?” Jojola said, seething. “Look, you baby-faced James Bond wannabe. I was kicking the asses of tougher men than these two before you were born.”
“You mean we were kicking your ass,” Tran retorted before sneering at the agent and adding, “But yeah, tre em imbecile-”
“Sort of French-Vietnamese for ‘imbecile child’ …,” Lucy interpreted helpfully.
“-all I see are cheap suits, bad haircuts, and snot-nosed children playing at being men,” Tran continued.
“All right, boys,” Lucy interrupted. “I think we still have work to do, and we need to move on.”
She smiled and shook her head. She’d met Jojola, a member of the Taos Indian tribe, when he was the tribe’s chief of police and had teamed with her and her mother to catch a serial child-killer in New Mexico. A decorated army veteran who’d served during the Vietnam War, he was a spiritual man who had not been surprised that the crossing of their paths, and the seemingly coincidental events that had twisted their fates together, led to his joining Espey Jaxon’s small counterterrorism agency.
At least it was no stranger than the participation in the agency of Tran Vinh Do, a longtime family friend, mostly because of his dedication to Lucy’s mother, Marlene. Tran was a former Vietcong leader during the war in Vietnam and was now currently a gangster in New York City. Although she didn’t need convincing that there was more than coincidence to all of their lives crossing, it didn’t surprise her to learn that Jojola and Tran had been sworn enemies during the Vietnam conflict, even though they’d since buried all but the verbal hatchets and were the best of friends.
The federal agents glared at Jojola and Tran for a moment but then the lead agent shrugged. As he turned Ghilzai around, he looked at Akhund and said, “Good work, Hasim. We’ll put in a good word with the judge.”
Akhund furrowed his brow, trying to understand what the agent was saying, but Ghilzai got it right away and lunged at his partner. “Traitor!” he spat as the agent restrained him. “I knew you could not be trusted! As Allah is my witness, you will die for this and your soul be cast into the pits of jahannam!”
Hasim Akhund’s eyes grew wide with fear. “I did nothing,” he said. “They are trying to make me look like a traitor!”
“Okay, you two, break up the love fest,” the lead agent said. “Captain, would you make the announcement? Meantime, you two assholes stand there against the window. You might enjoy what you’re going to see.”
The ferry captain picked up the microphone to the public address system and spoke. “Ladies and gentlemen, please remain in your seats. Our sister ferry tied up next to us is ready to get back in service and so we’re going to let her go ahead. We hope you enjoyed your visit to the American Family Immigration History Center and we’ll be under way for Liberty Island shortly.”
With that, the captain turned off the microphone and nodded to the agents and Lucy. “Good luck,” he said.
“Thanks,” Lucy replied as she and her two cohorts quickly moved toward the door. She’d remained aboard the ferry when it docked so that she could listen in with eavesdropping equipment on any calls placed by Ghilzai’s cell phone. She knew the code words he was going to use if the attack was going forward, but if he had changed his mind and contacted his counterparts speaking in Urdu or Arabic, her talents might have been needed. They knew a lot of what was planned, especially regarding the attempt to hijack the ferry, but they did not know how to locate the other part of the terrorist team-only that they were going to attack by boat. Now she had to get to the other ferry.
Lucy ducked out of the pilothouse and hurried past curious, but not alarmed, tourists. She quickly made her way to the other ferry, stepping aboard as the crew cast off and the boat pulled away from the pier.
4
It was a lovely spring morning in Gotham when Karp and Murrow emerged onto Crosby Street and turned the corner onto Grand Street for the half mile or so walk to the Criminal Courts Building on Centre Street. The trees were beginning to bud and although the sun had yet to peer over the tops of the skyscrapers, their fellow pedestrians smiled and chatted beneath clear blue skies as they wove their way through the throng on the busy sidewalks.
Reaching the front of the massive Criminal Courts Building, Karp pointed to a newsstand. “I’ll be up in a minute,” he said. “I’m going to go pick up the Times and say hello to Warren.”
As Karp approached, “Dirty” Warren Bennett, who owned the newsstand, looked up through thick, smudged glasses and grinned. “Hey, Butch … asshole bitch … how are you this morning?” the thin little man with the long, pointed nose asked.
Karp smiled back. Bennett hadn’t earned his nickname because of the state of his clothes or personal hygiene, though both were in need of a good washing. The moniker was due to his Tourette’s syndrome, which, in addition to causing muscle spasms and facial tics, made him involuntarily swear like a longshoreman.
“Hey, I got one … oh boy shit whoop crap … for you,” Bennett said.
Karp’s smile disappeared and was replaced by his game face. He and the news vendor had been playing movie trivia for years, with Bennett trying to stump Karp, which he’d yet to do. “Well, pilgrim, draw if you’ve got the cojones,” he replied with his best, though poor, John Wayne imitation.
Bennett sneered. “Oh yeah? Okay then, Mr. Wayne. In 1944 Lux Radio Theater featured … whoop whoop oh boy … a radio adaptation of this movie with Betty Grable, Carmen Miranda, and John Payne,” he said. “Name the movie and be exact.”
Karp scoffed. “Appropriate choice for this morning,” he replied. “Springtime in the Rockies. That exact enough for you?” He waited for Bennett’s face to show the first sign of triumph before he shattered his friend’s hope of finally scoring a point. “But it’s a trick question, Mr. Bennett,” he said, watching his opponent’s hopeful expression immediately fade. “John Payne played the part of Dan Christy in the film, but Dick Powell replaced him for the radio version.”
“Damn it, Karp, you bastard,” exclaimed Bennett, whose responses weren’t always tied to Tourette’s. But he shook his head and smiled. “Man, you’re … oh boy shit piss … good.”
Karp wig
gled his eyebrows. “Don’t mess with the Duke of Trivia, pilgrim.”
Both men laughed as Karp picked up a newspaper and paid the vendor. But as he turned toward the Criminal Courts Building, a shout interrupted his good mood.
“There here he is! There’s Karp!” The shout elicited jeers and epithets.
Looking in the direction of the voices, Karp saw a dozen or so protesters, some carrying picket signs, walking swiftly toward him on the sidewalk. Emerging from the middle of the pack to lead them was the Reverend C. G. Westlund, who didn’t yell but smirked as he approached.
“I’m getting a little … tits oh boy … tired of these jokers,” Bennett snarled, leaving his newsstand to confront the mob.
“It’s just words, Warren,” Karp said, placing a hand on his friend’s shoulder and pulling him back. He then stepped toward his detractors. “Let’s hear what they have to say.”
Westlund marched up until he was only a couple of feet from Karp and blocking his way into the courts building. “Repent, Brother Karp, and drop the charges against the Ellises, who were faithful to the will of God!” he thundered.
“I believe we’ll leave that for a jury to decide,” Karp replied evenly. “Now, if that’s all you’ve got to say, I have more important things to do.”
But Westlund stepped closer as his followers drew in, their faces angry and some a bit wild-eyed. “More important than answering our questions about God’s place in the home of simple Christian Americans? Have you forgotten that this is a nation founded upon Christian ideals of faith in God, or do those of the Jewish faith not recognize the efficacy of prayer? Or the rights of Americans to ask God for deliverance from earthly ills and deny the ungodly arrogance of Western medicine that seeks to supplant God as the arbiter of life and death? Granted, most doctors are Jewish, as are most lawyers.”
Bad Faith bkamc-24 Page 3