Bad Faith

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

5

  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.

  “For propaganda purposes,” Malovo had explained.

  Thanks to Malovo’s information, they’d been able to identify Ghilzai and Akhund; knew where the accomplice (who’d since been arrested) had hidden the weapons, which had been exchanged for harmless fakes; and were waiting for Ghilzai to pass the word to proceed to the others when the ferry started to leave the dock.

  Originally, they had considered remaining on the regular ferry and continuing with the journey, inviting attack even with the tourists aboard, so that the waiting terrorists would not note anything amiss. But there was too much of a risk that the attackers might get through the first line of defense and hurt or kill an innocent adult or child. So they’d come up with the idea of switching ferries, bringing the second ferry with the armed agents over in the middle of the night.

  Malovo knew that the main terrorist group would be approaching the ferry from the water, but she said she wasn’t sure of the boat they would be using as they planned to steal one in the night. And that was a source of concern. On any given day in the spring, New York Harbor was jumping with watercraft, from oceangoing freighters and Hudson River barges to cabin cruisers, yachts, and small sailboats. The feds would have to let some of them approach close enough to be sure they were the enemy or risk tipping the terrorists off and allowing them to escape to plan some other attack.

  It was the reason Malovo had been brought along for the ride. She would make her appearance from the pilothouse and then go back inside once the attackers had revealed themselves. And indeed that’s what happened.

  When they reached the waters off Liberty Island in front of the statue, Malovo walked out of the pilothouse and the captain shut his engines down as if he was following the instructions of Ghilzai. That’s when a large cabin cruiser that had been in with the other boat traffic suddenly veered toward them.

  Jaxon had waited for the terrorists’ boat to separate from the vessels around them and move to within a few hundred yards, then gave the word. Suddenly, a half-dozen New York Police Department speedboats and a U.S. Coast Guard gunboat with a fifty-caliber machine gun mounted on the bow materialized seemingly out of nowhere. The gunboat swerved into the path of the cabin cruiser; the terrorists tried to escape, but they were cut off by the NYPD craft surrounding them. At the same time, two dozen federal agents from Jaxon’s office and NIDSA transformed from supposed tourists milling about on deck to armed men ready to repel boarders. They were then joined by an NYPD helicopter with a sharpshooter perched in the open side door.

  Surrounded, the terrorists had fired a few shots before cutting their engines and stopping in the water. After a half hour, they’d agreed to talk, and a small rubber dinghy had been launched from the gunboat with a cell phone. Apparently, the group was split on how to proceed; some of them wanted to surrender, but others—apparently foreigners, as they spoke to Lucy in Arabic and Urdu—refused. They’d been told they had until nine, which was now only a few minutes away.

  “Something’s happening!” Blanchett shouted.

  6

  THE DIN OF TWO DOZEN MEN AND WOMEN CARRYING ON A variety of conversations stopped the moment Karp walked into the conference room and took his seat at the head of the long table for the weekly Monday morning bureau chiefs meeting. On either side of him, the New York DAO’s chiefs and assistant chiefs, and a smattering of assistant district attorneys, waited expectantly, some sitting at the table, others occupying whatever seat they could find around the room.

  The room itself reflected Karp’s own minimalist attitude, its walls unadorned, the table and chairs about as basic and worn as the building itself. There wasn’t time to worry about the décor. In fact, Karp had never even noted the putrid green color that coated the walls of the corridors, courtrooms, and offices at 100 Centre Street until Marlene had commented on them a few years earlier.

  All that mattered in that room was the fair and effectual process of dealing with the administration of justice for the victims and perpetrators of an average of four hundred murders, twelve hundred rapes, seventeen thousand felony assaults, eighteen thousand burglaries, nineteen thousand robberies, and thirty-eight thousand grand larcenies—not to mention tens of thousands of “lesser” crimes—inflicted every year upon the citizens of New York County.

  The meetings had been a fixture of Garrahy’s administration, and while they’d gone by the wayside during the decline of the office after his death, they had been reinstated when Karp was elected to office years later. Outwardly the purpose of the meetings was for assistant district attorneys to present their pre-indictment cases to the other prosecutors in the room, who would then do their best to dissect and question the authenticity and credibility of the evidence, as well as discuss the expected response and counterattack of the defense. And woe to the ADA who came into that meeting unprepared to answer the questions.

  On a larger scale, the meetings were to ensure that the office’s two guiding principles for prosecuting the accused were being followed. Also something Karp had picked up from his mentor Garrahy, the principles required that they be 1,000 percent convinced of the accused’s factual guilt and have the legally admissible evidence to prove it. It was not enough to believe that the defendant was “probably” guilty, nor was it acceptable to go to trial without the evidence to prove the case—no matter how convinced the ADA was of a person’s guilt.

  As Karp looked around the table, he noticed Kenny Katz off to his left. The slim, muscular young man with dark curly hair had a troubled look on his face and didn’t appear to be tuned in to what was happening in front of him. With the Ellis trial set to start the next week, he knew that his protégé was probably feeling the pressure of being in the driver’s seat of his first high-profile case. He decided it was time they had a private talk.

  “Tommy Mack,” Karp said, addressing his Homicide Bureau chief, “take over. I just remembered I had something I wanted to discuss with Mr. Katz. … Kenny, could I see you in my office?”

  Once inside Karp’s office, Katz took a seat on the edge of a leather chair beside the front o
f Karp’s desk. It didn’t take long for the ADA to validate Karp’s assessment of what was bugging him. “You know, you hear a lot about how this is a religious-freedom First Amendment case,” Katz said to his boss, who settled behind his desk. “And then even in the office there’s quite a bit of disagreement about whether reckless manslaughter was the appropriate charge.”

  Karp studied the young man for a moment, seeing himself as he’d once looked when he sat in that chair, in front of that desk, confessing his own doubts to the legendary DA Francis Garrahy. It reminded him that one of the most important aspects of his job was training the next generation.

  “Look, Kenny, first of all let’s deal with the First Amendment bullshit,” Karp said at last. “Nowhere in the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, does anyone get immunized against committing murder or child abuse. As Justice Robert Jackson said, the Constitution is not a suicide pact, and it is certainly not a ‘get out of jail free’ card. And as far as our case is concerned, no one is infringing on the defendants’ rights to practice their religion when it comes to their personal decisions. As adults, if they want to put their trust in prayer and eschew modern medicine, even at the risk of their own lives, that is their right. However, there is nothing in law that says that one person’s individual constitutional protection is absolute or trumps the rights of someone else. Or, for that matter, protects someone who commits a crime. For instance, how about the recent example of the leader of that polygamist sect in Arizona? He was charged with sexually assaulting underage girls who he claimed were his wives and said that such a practice fell under religious protections in the Constitution. Do laws against sexual assault, particularly against minors, not apply because someone claims that it’s part of his religion?”

  “No, of course not,” Katz said.

  “Good, then let’s move on and look at the facts of this case and whether it was charged appropriately,” Karp said. “The way I see it, this is a case of child abuse, plain and simple. And what’s more, such a severe case of child abuse that a ten-year-old boy died as a result. Regardless of the parents’ religious or philosophical beliefs, when they take on the responsibility of bringing a child into this world, they have a duty to provide for that child, including seeking commonly accepted medical help when that child is sick. Talk about rights; that child had the right to count on his parents to protect him and keep him safe, as well as make decisions on his behalf that he was too young to make for himself.”