Bad Faith

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Nonie had immediately asked Sarah to tell her story, but as he instructed her, Sarah insisted that they first pray with Micah. When the prayer ended, the boy was again queried as to whether he felt better, and looking up at his mother’s hopeful face, he said yes.

  Westlund then suggested that Sister Sarah share her story over a cup of tea. As though reliving a nightmare, the other woman wept and shuddered as she recounted how her young son, “Kevin,” had been diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. The doctors at the Children’s Hospital had warned her that without chemotherapy her son would die, but added that the treatments they felt were necessary were “experimental” and could even kill him outright.

  “As you already know, the things they put my poor little boy through were horrible,” Sarah whimpered. “My child was being tortured and poisoned, but I thought it was the only way to save him … that’s what those … doctors told me.” She hung her head and wiped at her cheeks with a tissue handed to her by David Ellis. “But I didn’t know what else to do. My husband had left me when Kevin was diagnosed and I had no one to turn to …”

  Sarah stopped and smiled sweetly at Westlund. “Our great friend, our blessed brother John LaFontaine, spoke at our little church, and with the truth he gets from God, he turned me away from liars and to Christ. It wasn’t easy … he had to battle first for my soul so that I could believe enough … I had been a terrible sinner—”

  “Yes, you were, sister,” Westlund said, and chuckled.

  “—and my sins were visited upon my innocent child,” Sarah said to Westlund, “but you saved me.”

  Westlund had held up his hand. “Not I, sister, it was your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, who caused the Holy Spirit He’d once used to heal the sick and raise the dead to move through my hands so that I could cleanse your son of the disease Satan had planted in his blood.”

  Sarah had reached into her purse and pulled out a photograph of a young boy with blue eyes and blond hair. “This is my son now,” she said, “three years after the doctors said he would die. Oh, they claim his recovery is a ‘spontaneous remission’ without a known cause, but I know who cured him … the Lord and this good man here.” She’d paused to show the Ellises the photograph.

  “He’s a beautiful boy,” Nonie Ellis said. “Like my Micah, only older …” She suddenly burst into tears.

  Ready for the moment, Sister Sarah jumped to her side before even David Ellis could get there to console her. “It’s okay, Nonie,” the con woman cooed. “Help is here. All you need to do is trust in the Lord … and Doctor LaFontaine.”

  Nonie had been persuaded ever since. But David had been a tougher sell, though he’d gone along with his wife’s wishes and, as his son improved, warmed somewhat to Westlund. However, the woman had confided that her husband sometimes argued with her about getting Micah checked at the hospital. So one day when Sarah, who often came on his visits, was occupying Nonie with Micah, Westlund asked David if he could talk to him alone.

  “Brother, I know you have reservations about me and my work,” he said after they sat down in the living room. “And I wanted to say that I understand your reluctance to embrace what I’m telling you. Not many people know this, but I was a ferocious sinner until one day I met a man of God hitchhiking by the side of the road and I was overcome with the Holy Spirit through what he had to say. It was the Truth, and I knew it when I heard it. And, in that moment, I went from a hell-raising, motorcycle-riding, womanizing spawn of Satan to preaching the Word of God. That roadside preacher told me that I had been given a gift, the gift of healing body and spirit. And, brother, I have tried my best to share that with you and your family.”

  Not quite sure what to make of the conversation so far, David looked confused but then nodded. “I understand that and I really do appreciate all the time you’ve spent with us,” he said. “And Nonie, well, she thinks the world of you, and I know Micah does, too.”

  “Thank you, brother. But what about you?”

  The question caught the young man off guard. He stammered a bit before answering. “Well, I think you’re great as a person and you obviously care about other people. It’s just that … well, just that I’m not convinced that prayer is the only thing we should be doing for Micah right now. I think that God works in different ways, including medicine.”

  Westlund held the young man’s gaze for a moment, then dropped his head and nodded. “I hear ya, brother, I really do,” he said. “And to be quite honest, I was afraid we’d reach this point. You see, for me to heal through the Holy Spirit, it’s not enough for the afflicted to believe, or for some of the people who love them to believe, or even for those people to believe but not with every bit of faith they have. I know there are many gray areas in this wicked old world, but I believe that faith is an all-or-nothing proposition. What sense does it make for a man to say, ‘I have faith in God to heal my son, but I don’t want to take any chances so I will place some of my faith in hospitals and doctors and the poisons they want to pump into my child’?”

  Westlund paused and appeared to wipe away tears that had apparently formed in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know I get worked up about this, but it’s because I truly have come to care about you, Nonie, and Micah … he is such a beautiful child.”

  Suddenly, Westlund stood. “However, I respect your beliefs, and after all, he is your son. Yet I cannot in good conscience continue my work here when I know that your faith is torn between God and man’s arrogance. I’ll just say good-bye to Micah and Nonie, and then I will leave you to your fate—though I will, of course, continue to pray for all of you.”

  As expected, David Ellis had looked at him in alarm. “Really, I don’t mind your being here,” he said. “I believe in God and Jesus. I just think that—”

  Westlund held his hand up. “No need to explain, brother, I understand,” he said. “I respect your position, but I’m afraid I need to be going.”

  At that moment, Sarah entered the room with Nonie, who saw the two men facing each other and asked, “What’s wrong?”

  Westlund smiled and shrugged. “There is nothing wrong, dear little sister, just a difference of opinion. But it is time for me to leave your family in peace and go where I am of more use.”

  “What? No!” Nonie cried in alarm, looking from her husband to Westlund and back to David. “What did you say?” she demanded.

  Westlund pretended to play the part of the peacemaker. “It’s all right. God gives us free will to make decisions and David is exercising his, but it means I must leave.”

  David began to protest. “But I never said—”

  “I explained to your husband,” Westlund interrupted, “that for Micah to be saved through the Holy Spirit, those who love him the most must give themselves over entirely to faith in God and no other.”

  “But I do believe,” Nonie cried out, bursting into tears. “And Micah believes. Please don’t leave us!” She turned to David, her eyes flashing with desperation and anger as she snarled, “How could you? Haven’t you seen what he’s done for Micah?”

  “Honey, I didn’t ask him to go,” David pleaded. “I just think that maybe we should follow up with the doctors for Micah …”

  Nonie glared and her voice hardened. “What? So they can poison our son with the devil’s lies again? You want to put him through that torture? Next they’ll want to use surgery that they already told us might kill him!”

  “I just want what’s best for our son and—”

  “I don’t care!” Nonie shrieked. “I don’t care what you want … our son is going to die and it’s because of you! I hate you!”

  David Ellis looked like someone had hit him over the head with a two-by-four. Now tears welled in his eyes until at last he nodded and looked at the ground. “You’re right,” he said to Westlund. “It’s all or nothing. I believe in God or I believe in the doctors.” He looked at his wife, who nodded and began to smile. “I’ll believe in God with you, Nonie.”

  As t
he woman beamed at her husband, Westlund placed his hands on David’s shoulders. “Hallelujah, brother!” he exclaimed. “I’ve been waiting to hear those words for so long. I believe, Sister Sarah, that we have witnessed another miracle in the making of a new warrior for Christ. Let us get down on our knees and thank the Lord!”

  “Hallelujah!” Sister Sarah shouted.

  Hallelujah indeed, Westlund thought as he waited now for David Ellis to arrive at his apartment door.

  11

  WAITING IN AN INTERVIEW ROOM AT THE VARICK FEDERAL Detention Center Facility in downtown New York City, Nadya Malovo opened the buttons on her jail jumpsuit to reveal a hint of cleavage. One of the jail matrons was sure to make her button it up again later, but for this meeting she hoped to make good use of her physical assets. She glanced over at the one-way mirror, nodding at the man she knew was watching from the other side.

  Settling back into her chair, Malovo gave her short blond hair a final shake and smiled slightly, satisfied. Everything was going according to plan. But these are only the first steps, and there are many more, she reminded herself.

  She knew that even with her meticulous planning, she was walking a razor’s edge; all it would take was one slipup and it would all be over. However, it did not trouble her that her plan was a desperate one; it was simply a fact that she used to keep herself focused. She’d been walking an edge since her early twenties, and if anything she needed that adrenaline rush to feel alive.

  Nadya Malovo, a.k.a. Ajmaani, had been an orphan scraping for a living on the cold hard streets of Moscow, where her nascent criminality and her unreal physical abilities as a sometime cat burglar got her noticed by the authorities. But instead of prison they sent her to a “special school for girls” to be trained as a spy and assassin.

  Roughly twenty-five years later, she now killed without remorse, and while she would do anything to avoid being killed, she didn’t fear it. Fear of death will get you killed. She could still hear the harsh voice of her old KGB mentor. He’d been a great teacher, though she thought of him without affection. After all, he’d been a merciless overseer of her training who had her brutally raped by some of her male “colleagues” so that no enemy would ever be able to use that degradation to break her down. When it was over, she showered, tended to her wounds, dressed herself, and reported for duty as if nothing had happened.

  There was one lesson he’d never been able to get her to accept. A professional has no time or desire for revenge; it is business. Revenge burned in Malovo like the coals of last night’s fire, waiting to be fanned into a sudden flame, and she never passed up the opportunity for it if it fit her plans. Many years later, long after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when she was working as a freelance assassin and agent provocateur, she found her former mentor in a remote cottage in the Urals, where he’d retired. She castrated him and left him to die slowly in the snow while she sipped a glass of wine and watched from the front porch of his home.

  Her current plan was intertwined with the threads of revenge as well. Threads that involved her nemesis, the six-foot-five New York City DA Roger “Butch” Karp and his loathsome family. Just thinking about the man made the coals in her dark soul glow brighter.

  The eventual success of her plan depended on her being out of Florence ADX, the maximum-security prison in Colorado, which normally only housed the worst, most violent and dangerous male prisoners but had made a special allowance for Malovo. There was no escaping from “the Alcatraz of the Rockies,” as the prison was known, so she had to scheme to get out as an undercover informant for the U.S. government.

  So her part of the “deal” with the Americans was that she would infiltrate so-called sleeper cells of Muslim extremists as her alter ego the Chechen terrorist Ajmaani; learn their plans; and pass the information on to the agencies. She’d been able to convince her captors that according to her sources, al-Qaeda was planning a series of strikes in New York City, culminating with one massive attack on a date and location that were as yet unknown; they only knew it would be within the year and hit Manhattan.

  Of course it was all a lie to get out of the prison and back to New York City. Except for the massive attack … That is real, she thought.

  In reality, it was Ajmaani who contacted the sleeper cells—which she’d known of prior to her arrest—and with forged documents purported to come from higher-ups in al-Qaeda, or some other extremist organization, planned attacks and set them in motion. Then she turned around and betrayed the terrorists to win the confidence of the Americans, starting with the attack on the Liberty Island ferry.

  The attack on the ferry and its aftermath could not have gone better. She’d located Ghilzai and other foreign-born members of that cell, sprinkled in some American jihadis to ruin the cohesion of the group and sow distrust, and then told them that the time had come to “strike a blow for Allah and attack the Great Satan.”

  As she had ever since assuming the role of Ajmaani, first for the Russian government trying to destroy the Muslim separatist movement in Chechnya and later for the highest bidder, she found the mujahideen to be extremely gullible, and the one involved in the ferry attack was no exception. It wasn’t that they were all stupid or uneducated or even poor, though some were all three. But whether it was their religious upbringing or dissatisfaction with their lives, or a psychological predisposition to accepting the orders of authority figures as gospel, it didn’t take much to convince them that sacrificing their lives to kill others would earn them a place in paradise.

  “Of course their leaders never volunteer to kill themselves for Allah,” she’d laughed cynically when talking to the NIDSA agent Mike Rolles as they drove back from the harbor following the attack. “They have enough fools to use as cannon fodder for God.”

  And cannon fodder is what they’ve become, she mused as she waited for her new attorney to arrive. No survivors. No witnesses.

  It was all part of the plan to not only escape her captors but live well and on her own terms after that, with each piece of the plot that would win her freedom snapping into the others like a jigsaw puzzle. One piece had been to establish herself as the fearless Ajmaani and take part in the attack. But in addition to wanting to be present in case something went wrong and she needed to intervene, she had to be able to send a message to certain people that she was in charge of events.

  Another piece had been to select the most fanatical foreign-born terrorists to be on board the attacking vessel, who were told to avoid capture no matter what the cost to their lives. “If you are stopped from completing your main mission, blow yourselves up; it will still make a dramatic statement in the media, especially Al Jazeera television. You will be heroes and martyrs for Allah,” she’d told the boat leader the night before the attack.

  Even then she’d taken no chances. Her appearance on the ferry when the talks with the attackers had stalemated was to send a signal to one of her men stationed in a hotel room on the southern end of the island with a view of what was happening. When it was apparent that at least some of the attackers on board the boat survived the barrage of fire from the police, he’d use a remote-control detonator to set off the bomb that had been planted belowdecks unbeknownst to the attackers.

  She tried to consider everything, even making Ghilzai believe that Akhund was the traitor. Ghilzai would never talk, and Akhund would never survive jail. She would also make sure of that.

  In return for helping thwart the terrorists, Malovo had worked out a deal in which she would be placed in the federal witness protection program and given a quiet new life in some out-of-the-way community. I’d rather rot in prison than suffocate in suburbia. She had no intention of doing either.

  However, she needed to convince the authorities that it was what she wanted, though she knew that the agent Espey Jaxon and U.S. Marshal Capers, who had refused to relinquish total control of Malovo to NIDSA, would be suspicious. She would have to deal with them and made a mental note to file away their obvious personal
feelings for each other, information that could be useful later on.

  After her arrest, Malovo refused to say much of anything to U.S. interrogators other than the occasional tantalizing tidbit about people she knew, including traitors within the U.S and Russian governments and the supersecretive Sons of Man. It was enough for the feds to send in a stream of agents, men and women, hoping she’d open up to one of them. But not until NIDSA agent Michael Rolles entered the interview room did she begin to “spill her guts.” Of course there was a reason for that.

  When he was sure they were alone, he quietly said, “Myr shegin dy ve, bee eh.” It meant “What must be, will be” in Manx, the language of the Isle of Man. It was also the mother language of the Sons of Man, who had grown from a group of pirates and smugglers in the eighteenth century into a clandestine syndicate of powerful and wealthy descendants bent on U.S. and world domination. It was the signal she’d been waiting for; help had arrived … for a price.

  Gradually, so as not to arouse the suspicions of anyone watching, she warmed up to Rolles, and in their first two-hour interview “revealed” a smidgeon of information that had led to a bomb-making operation in the Bronx. Her captors, including Espey Jaxon and U.S Marshal Capers, appeared to have final say in where she went and when. But she was NIDSA’s prize due to her relationship with Rolles, as she made it look like he had touched some vulnerable part of her psyche to the point that several months into his appearance, she flirted shamelessly and suggestively with Rolles. The irony was that Rolles wouldn’t have been susceptible to her feminine wiles even if that had been part of her plan.