“‘Yield unto Caesar that which is his sayeth the Lord,’ get it, Westlund?” Karp replied. “Break the law here and you’re going to be held responsible. And more accurately our American heritage is founded upon Judeo-Christian values, which you don’t adhere to.”
As the crowd pressed in, Karp had to admit it was the sort of situation in which one crazed person, agitated by Westlund’s words, might decide to act. He was ready to defend himself, but the need was suddenly averted when a large black sedan pulled up to the curb a few feet from where Karp was standing toe-to-toe with the preacher and his followers.
A thick, broad-shouldered black man emerged from the vehicle. “Morning, Butch,” Clay Fulton said, walking up to stand next to his employer and longtime friend. He then looked at Westlund and his followers. “What seems to be the problem here?”
Just from the big detective’s body language, Karp could tell that Fulton was spoiling for a fight. He couldn’t blame him; he was half tempted to rock Westlund himself for his anti-Semitic remarks. But he wasn’t going to play that game. “Good morning, Clay,” he replied. “The good reverend and his flock were just enjoying their First Amendment right of free speech and now will be getting out of my way so I can go to work. Isn’t that right, reverend?”
Westlund’s eyes narrowed. “‘The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion’!” he shouted as his supporters cheered.
“If you’re going to quote Proverbs 28 … whoop oh boy … quote all of it!” Bennett shouted back. “‘Those who forsake the law praise the wicked, but those who keep the law’ … oh boy bite my ass … ‘strive against them. Evil men do not understand justice but those who seek the Lord’ … crap bastard … ‘understand it completely.’”
Karp looked back at his friend with surprise. “Why thank you, Warren,” he said. “Write that down for me sometime.”
“My pleasure,” Bennett replied, his face twitching as he sniffed and then wrinkled his nose as if he’d caught a foul scent. “I know a false prophet … asswipe … when I smell one.”
Westlund glared at Bennett and then Karp before stepping aside. “Just trying to save your soul, brother,” he said to Karp, then turned to Bennett. “God has afflicted your mouth for the foulness of your soul. Repent and you might yet be saved!”
“Why you piece of …” As he spoke, Bennett tried to get at the much larger man but Karp held him back.
“He’s not worth it, Warren,” Karp said.
“Don’t worry, little man,” Westlund snarled, “God has ordained that we’ll meet again.”
Moving so quickly that the preacher flinched and took a step back, Karp got in Westlund’s face. “Let’s be very clear about something, Mr. Westlund,” he growled in a voice so low that only those closest to them could hear. “You and I are the ones who will be meeting again, but it’s going to be in court and you’ll be sitting at the defense table.”
Westlund recovered quickly, though he moved away from Karp. “You see, my brothers and sisters, when faced with God’s truth, the evil resort to threats!” he told his followers, who shouted and cursed.
Karp ignored them and looked at Bennett. “You okay, Warren?”
Bennett’s angry eyes still followed Westlund as the preacher led his followers away, but he nodded. “Yeah, to hell … crap oh boy ohhhh boy … with that asshole,” he said. “But thanks for … whoop whoop … sticking up for me.”
“Seems to me we were sticking up for each other,” Karp replied, and clapped the smaller man on his shoulder. “If he bothers you, just let me know.”
Bennett smiled, blinking up at Karp, his light blue eyes magnified behind his glasses. “Thanks, Karp. But I can handle that guy … or I have friends who will.”
Leaving Bennett at his newsstand, Karp entered the Criminal Courts Building on the Hogan Place side. Fulton then headed for the building’s security office and left him to ride the elevator up to his office on the eighth floor alone. As the car rose, he felt his face burning with anger. Some of it was for Warren Bennett, a good, hardworking man and one of several local street people who kept watch over the environs and people around the courthouse, especially Karp and his family. Although unsure of how exactly their system worked, Karp was aware that they reported to David Grale, the “mad monk” who believed God had appointed him to rid the city of evil men he believed were possessed by demons. The irony was that the killer had made it part of his mission to safeguard Marlene and the kids, especially Lucy, whom he’d met when they were both working in a Catholic soup kitchen.
Exiting the elevator and walking into the conference area of his office, he noticed that his receptionist, Darla Milquetost, was setting up and preparing for the bureau chiefs meeting. He wished her a good morning and entered the inner sanctum of his personal private office space, still thinking about the confrontation with Westlund and his band of lunatics. He regretted being drawn into a war of words with the bellicose preacher, but it had been hard to stomach the man’s anti-Semitic remarks.
Those and more bigoted comments had begun shortly after the Ellises were indicted. Early on, Westlund’s attacks were subtle. He couched Karp’s ethnicity as a “possible explanation” for why the DAO was “persecuting” the Ellises, as well as himself and his followers.
“Nothing against the Jewish people, but I suppose we should expect,” the minister had explained to a radio talk-show host, “that someone of the district attorney’s faith would fail to recognize true Christians’ right to place their faith in God and not the false god of modern medicine.”
Other times, Westlund’s prejudices were thinly disguised as backhanded compliments. “Jews, such as our district attorney, are known as a ‘practical’ race of people who tend to believe more in science and man’s infallibility than Christians, who put God first. That’s why Jews are so successful at business and secular professions, while Christians place more stock in spirituality.”
But after being jailed for obstructing the paramedics, Westlund had ramped up the vitriol. Upon his release from the Tombs, the firebrand preacher told a waiting television crew, “Karp comes from a long line of predecessors who enjoy persecuting Christians; that’s why he’s out to crucify me and my brothers and sisters in the End of Days Reformation Church of Jesus Christ Resurrected.”
When his comments were challenged by an editorial writer the next day, Westlund backtracked. He complained that his remarks had been “taken out of context” when aired on the evening news. By “predecessors,” he said, he’d meant other district attorneys and law officers, not Jews. And his reference to crucifying, he added, was just a metaphor to illustrate how the Ellises were being “unfairly and harshly” treated for their spiritual beliefs.
As the trial date neared, Westlund was savvy enough to let his followers make the most inflammatory comments, up to and including that the DAO was prosecuting the Ellises solely because Karp was an evil Jew who hated Christians. Occasionally when one of his followers stepped over the line enough for the media to raise their collective eyebrows, Westlund would issue a press release through his church saying that he did not “condone hate speech.” He attributed the venal comments to “a few overwrought church members who are reacting to the district attorney’s attack on the fundamental American right to practice religion without the interference of the government. It may have been an inappropriate way to express their feelings, but I think what you’re seeing is their frustration as yet another one of their God-given rights is taken from them.”
As Karp’s reflection continued, he was reminded that Westlund and his ilk weren’t the only ones using God’s name in vain to further their hateful personal agendas. But his thoughts were interrupted when his receptionist announced the arrival of Murrow, who stuck his head in the door. “Ready, boss?” he asked, referring to the bureau chiefs meeting.
“Yeah, let’s go,” Karp replied, wondering how this day that had begun so full of beauty would end.
5
&
nbsp; Espey Jaxon looked up from the deck of the ferry, saw the news helicopter circling in the distance, and then noticed Nadya Malovo out of the corner of his eye. She’d come out from the interior of the boat with Agent Mike Rolles, her National Inter-Departmental Security Administration handler, and walked over to stand beside him. She looked across the water at the motorboat filled with armed men that stood motionless in the water.
“I thought the idea was to keep her out of sight,” Jaxon said to Agent Rolles with a frown.
Before the agent could answer, U.S. Marshal Jen Capers emerged from the ferry and strode up to where the three stood. “It was,” she answered angrily. She pointed her finger at the agent and said, “This violates the agreement.”
“Relax,” Rolles said with a smirk. He reminded Jaxon of a college fraternity type playing at secret agent. “What’s she going to do, swim for it? She’s cuffed, and she’s with me. She just wanted to watch, and after all, she’s the reason Ali Baba and the Forty Terrorists on that boat over there are screwed. Or would you have rather watched this ferry and a few hundred tourists get incinerated on the news tonight?”
“She couldn’t care less about innocent people dying,” Capers spat, fixing Malovo with a hard stare. “She’s looking out for herself. Now she goes inside, or I’ll haul her sociopathic rear end back to that nice little cell we have for her at FloMax penitentiary. She’s still a prisoner of the U.S. Marshals Service.”
“Afraid national security trumps your little escort service,” the agent said scathingly.
“Yeah?” Capers replied, pulling out her cell phone and holding it up to him. “You want to explain to your boss and mine what your playing Pinocchio to her Geppetto has to do with national security? Maybe she’s yanking your strings, or something else, a bit too much and you need to be cut loose. Now, what’s it going to be? You want to make the call or should I?”
Rolles’s smirk dissolved into an angry glare and his face flushed. But then he turned to Malovo and nodded toward the door. “Go inside,” he snapped.
“Yes, of course,” Malovo replied in heavily accented English. She looked up at the news helicopter hovering in the distance and smiled at Capers. “I’ll leave you with your boyfriend and watch the festivities with someone who appreciates my … contributions. Such fire in a woman … a shame you only like men.”
Capers ignored the comment and signaled to a young marshal standing close to the ferry door. “Hank, escort the prisoner back inside,” she said, “and this time if she moves from where I told her to stay, cuff her to the rail.”
Hank Masterson, a former Navy SEAL and prior to that a college linebacker, nodded. “Yes, ma’am. And if Double-oh-seven has a problem with it, should I cuff him, too?”
Rolles bristled. “You want to go, big boy, let me know,” he shot back, but turned away when Masterson just laughed at him.
When the others were inside, Capers looked at Jaxon. “Sorry about that,” she said. “I had to call in to headquarters and couldn’t get any reception inside the ferry. Hank was supposed to stay with her but Rolles convinced him to wait for me. Good man, Hank, but he’s still learning.”
“Not a problem,” Jaxon replied as he smiled and then turned back to study the idling motorboat through his binoculars. “And it was worth listening to you cut that jackass down to size with the Pinocchio comment-‘yanking your strings, or something else,’ that’s classic. Still, I have to admit, I’m glad she tipped us off on this one.”
Capers didn’t respond to his last comment and he knew why. A year ago, Malovo had posed as the legal assistant of a lawyer who was helping defend a terrorist, the imam Jabbar, in a trial Karp was prosecuting. She poisoned a former leader of the Sons of Man as he was about to testify about his secret society’s role in aiding the defendant in an attack on the New York Stock Exchange. Malovo had then escaped from the courtroom and made her way to Il Buon Pane bakery, where she intended to murder the owner, Moishe Sobelman, just to torment her nemesis Butch Karp, who had befriended the old man. But Moishe’s wife, Goldie, had somehow made her hesitate, and then Capers arrived at the shop and got the drop on her.
It had taken every ounce of her professionalism for Capers not to pull the trigger and arrest her instead. Just a few months earlier, Malovo had led an attack that killed Capers’s partner. It rankled Capers that she now had to play babysitter for Malovo, who’d worked out some sort of deal with the NIDSA higher-ups in which she supplied information on radical Islamic sleeper cells.
“The powers that be decided we don’t need to know all of what she’s getting in exchange,” Capers told Jaxon one evening when they were discussing the arrangement over dinner. “We just know she’ll be going into WITSEC; but what else she gets, your guess is as good as mine, and for some reason it’s a big secret.”
Jaxon now grimaced remembering the conversation and Capers’s distress that instead of languishing in a tiny isolation cell with a shoebox-sized window for light twenty-three hours a day-or receiving the death penalty-her enemy would be placed in WITSEC, the federal witness protection program. There Malovo would, at the very least, be given a new identity, a place to live, and money to live on, and, most galling of all, the U.S. Marshals Service would be responsible for her safety.
“I’m sorry, querida,” he said now, using his pet name for her as no one was close enough to hear. “It’s just wrong. No matter what she gives us now, it doesn’t absolve her of the evil she’s done.”
Capers patted him lightly on the shoulder. “Don’t sweat it, pumpkin,” she replied. “My partner would have gladly given his life to save innocent people, even if it required our making a deal with the devil.”
“A she-devil,” Jaxon said, turning from the rail to face her.
“Yeah, and I’m worried about what she’s really got planned in that twisted mind,” Capers replied. “I have a hard time envisioning her settling down in some small obscure town in the Midwest and joining the local Junior League, all under the watchful eye of my office. That’s a leap too far if you get my drift.”
“I do,” Jaxon said. “But I feel safer knowing that you’re itching to put a bullet in her if she so much as blinks in the wrong direction.”
Capers nodded. “I wouldn’t mind.”
Jaxon smiled. “I rather enjoyed playing the old married couple in line this morning,” he said.
Capers returned the smile. “Yeah, something I could get used to,” she said, and then sighed. “Of course, a girl would have to be asked first.”
When she saw his expression change, she laughed again and said with a light drawl she’d picked up in her hometown of Austin, Texas, “Why bless your heart, Agent Espey Jaxon, you’re as red as a chili pepper. I do believe you’re feeling a tad backed into a corner?”
“No, I … um … well,” Jaxon stammered. “I just wasn’t expecting-”
Capers laughed again. “Don’t worry. You’re off the hook … for now. I’ll let you go back to capturing terrorists while I check on my prisoner and hope she tries to escape.”
“We still on for dinner at Butch and Marlene’s place tomorrow night?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for all the oil in Texas,” Capers replied.
As she disappeared back inside the ferry, Jaxon glanced over at where Ned Blanchett lay prone on the deck, looking through the scope of his sniper rifle at the terrorists on the other boat. A few feet beyond him, Lucy Karp and several NIDSA agents hovered around communication equipment set up for negotiating with the terrorists on the boat.
Lucy looked up as he approached and shook her head. Jaxon looked at his watch: 8:50. The terrorists had until nine to surrender or face attack.
He had insisted that his agency be in charge of this operation while the NIDSA agents took a backseat. Jaxon’s argument was that Malovo was vital to his agency’s attempts to root out the remaining members of the Sons of Man and should stay his prisoner. Under normal circumstances, a bigger national security group like NIDSA would have laughed and
taken over. But the powerful man who had formed Jaxon’s agency in secrecy and asked him to run it carried a lot of weight in the nation’s capital, and his team leader got what he wanted in this case.
After complaining vigorously, the chief agent for NIDSA gave in but insisted that his man be the liaison between Malovo and Jaxon’s agency. He had no choice but to agree; the assassin would only talk to the agent. Other agents with several agencies had tried to interrogate her after her arrest, but it wasn’t until the current macho man came along that she agreed to make a deal. Exactly what it was wasn’t clear, but it started with her not spending the rest of her life in FloMax, the maximum-security federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, that housed the worst of the worst, including the Blind Sheik and the Unabomber.
So Jaxon had to rely on the agent to pass on any information that was pertinent to the Sons of Man. Occasionally, Jaxon was allowed to question Malovo in the presence of the NIDSA agent about information she had provided. But most of what he learned was relayed in briefings.
Currently, she wasn’t divulging much about the Sons of Man. She’d diverted the focus to a series of terrorist plots aimed at the New York metropolitan area that she said her sources had told her were in the works. The sources believed that she was her alter ego, Ajmaani, a Chechen Muslim terrorist, and she’d used that to infiltrate the sleeper cells to find out their plans.
It was how they’d learned about the impending attack on the ferry. She said she’d been told that two men would board the ferry and wait until the boat was leaving Ellis Island before signaling to their comrades waiting in another boat and then commandeering the lightly guarded vessel using weapons they believed had been stashed aboard by an accomplice. Once the boat was in their control, they would order it stopped in the waters just off Liberty Island. They would then blow it up with everyone on it, including themselves and every man, woman, and child.
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