Malice

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “No one in my office would reveal confidential information,” Karp growled.

  “Jesus might have said the same thing about his disciples,” Grale replied, “until Judas took his thirty pieces of silver.”

  “Not my guys,” Karp insisted.

  Grale shrugged. “I’m here to warn you, not argue. But I can tell you that what I’m telling you is not just the opinion of your favorite mad monk, David Grale, but the collected wisdom of others who take an interest in your activities, as well as the safety of you and your family. But you’re a grown man, what you do with the information is up to you.”

  “And this ‘we’ you mention,” Karp said, “do ‘we’ have anything concrete to go on? This is all pretty conspiracy-theory stuff. Grassy knoll, two shooters, the CIA, and Castro.”

  “Yet, there are laws against conspiracy to commit murder, so sometimes conspiracies are real,” Grale pointed out.

  “Touché. Yeah, I know, ‘You aren’t paranoid if they really are after you,’” Karp replied.

  Grale laughed. “Good to know…sometimes it seems that way. But back to your question about who might be responsible. We have one name linked to much of this—Jamys Kellagh…J-A-M-Y-S…K-E-double L-A-G-H. Ring a bell?”

  Karp racked his brain for the name but drew a blank. “No, not that I can recall.”

  Grale nodded as if Karp had confirmed his suspicion. “We think that it’s an alias for whoever pulled the strings on Kane. We also have allies in Brooklyn who believe that he was the liaison with the terrorists who helped Kane.”

  “So you think all this is being controlled by one person? This Jamys Kellagh?”

  “No, no more than we believe that Kane was doing all of this on his own either.”

  Grale glanced over at the clock radio. “I haven’t much time,” he said, “but you’ll recall that when Kane tried to flee upriver from the Columbia University boathouse, my people intercepted his band. We were able to capture two of them alive and take them back to our little underworld home where we…um, persuaded them to speak candidly about what they knew. One died before he said anything useful. But the other seemed to have been somewhat higher up in their food chain. He said that Kane was in contact with someone named Jamys Kellagh, who apparently was getting inside information from the authorities.”

  “Anything regarding his identity?” Karp asked.

  “Nothing much,” Grale said. “There is a photograph—perhaps someday you will see it. I’m told that it shows our friend, Kane, the Russian agent, Nadya Malovo, and this Jamys Kellagh. Apparently, it is not good quality, and its owners are trying to decide how best to use the information to derail Kellagh’s plotting. His face is turned and it is difficult to identify him in the shadows, but he is wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a tattoo can be partly seen here….” Grale touched the inside of his right bicep.

  Karp contemplated the information. “Tell your source that the New York DAO would be happy to take the photograph and put it to good use.”

  “My ‘source’ is well aware of that,” Grale said, “but is concerned with the security breach.”

  “Well, what happened to your prisoner, then?” Karp asked. “I’d like to talk to him.”

  Grale gave him an amused look. “I’m afraid he didn’t survive our attempts to glean information from him. I can assure you, however, that he was an empty vessel before we dispatched him to the hell that awaits these demons.”

  Karp shuddered. The bastard probably thought he’d already gone to hell before they killed him. “What about Kane?” he asked. “You survived. Is he dead?”

  A scowl creased Grale’s face. He appeared to be weighing an old debate in his mind. At last he nodded. “Yes,” he replied. “I believe that he is dead. We struggled beneath the water for what seemed like hours. He was fast and strong and knew what he was doing with a knife. He cut me here”—Grale touched his side—“but the wound was not fatal. However, I had the pleasure of feeling my knife go deep into his chest.”

  Grale paused to suppress a cough. “I would have liked to have questioned him about those whom he served. But the current swept him away, and I was desperate for air.”

  “Your people find his body?” Karp asked.

  Grale shook his head. “We searched better than the cops. We also listened to word on the streets and in the dark places of our world. But there was nothing to suggest he lives. My mind tells me he is dead.”

  “What does your heart tell you?”

  Grale grimaced. “It tells me not to stop looking for him until I have his skull in my hands.”

  Karp shuddered. A sociopath named Felix Tighe had once been about to rape and murder Karp’s daughter, Lucy, until Grale showed up and put a stop to it. A few days later, the killer’s rat-gnawed skull had shown up at the New York Medical Examiner’s Office, where it was identified from dental work. Karp suddenly had a vision of Grale sitting on a throne surrounded by mounds of skulls like some Mongol king and flinched when Grale suddenly moved toward him.

  Grale backed away with a look of sadness on his gaunt face. “I wouldn’t hurt you, Mr. Karp,” he said.

  Karp relaxed, ashamed of his reaction. “I know that, David. I’m just a little jumpy. And it’s Butch, okay?”

  Grale smiled, moved again to the side of the bed, and reached above Karp’s head to push the nurse’s call button. A moment later, the buzzing of the fluorescent light in the hall stopped and the glow beneath the door disappeared. A red light appeared in the corner of the room indicating that the machines next to his bed were running on the backup power system.

  “Good night, Mr…. Butch. I’ll contact you again when we know more, though I may not have the pleasure of bringing it to you myself. Just be careful of who you trust.”

  Karp heard the door click open and remembered the thought in his dream about unfinished business. “Oh, by the way, David, I wanted to thank you for all you’ve done,” he said. But silence was the only reply, and he didn’t know if he’d been heard.

  There was the sound of running feet and his door was flung open by the young police officer, who entered with his hand on the butt of his gun. The officer shined his flashlight directly in Karp’s eyes and then around the room.

  “Uh, sorry, Mr. Karp,” he said. “I was, uh, down at the nurse’s station making sure they were okay when your room buzzer went off and then the power went out.”

  “That’s all right, Officer,” Karp replied. “I must have hit the button by accident in my sleep, and these old hospitals are always dealing with little power outages. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  The officer turned off his flashlight, wished him good night, and left the room. Alone in the dark again, Karp repeated himself. “Nothing to worry about at all.”

  2

  “WHY DON’T I GO AND, YOU KNOW, SLIP INTO SOMETHING more comfortable,” Ariadne Stupenagel purred, fending off the groping hands of her lover. “Now, now, no long faces…be a good Murry-wurry and fix us a couple of teeny-weeny martinis.”

  Gilbert Murrow pouted. It had been a long, frustrating day filling in for his boss at the District Attorney’s Office, and he’d have just as soon forgotten the preliminaries with Ariadne and gone straight to the main event.

  Then again—now that he had a moment to consider what she’d just said—it might be worth the wait. He never ceased to be amazed by her imaginative and ceaseless attempts to keep their sex lives ramped up. Which meant that he couldn’t be sure if “something more comfortable” meant naughty silk undergarments from Victoria’s Secret or something in leather and chains from the Kittens Toy Room catalog that she kept in her nightstand.

  Besides, he thought, a martini might take the edge off the day and give me the courage necessary to keep up with Ariadne’s more imaginative ideas.

  “Make the drinks and meet me on the roof, sugar buns,” she called over her shoulder. “I’ve been dreaming all day long about holding on to the railing and looking out at the lights of the city as you
slip up from behind me and…” She purposely left the end of the sentence dangling, like Murrow’s jaw, and disappeared into her bedroom.

  With effort, Murrow willed his mouth shut and hurried to the “bar,” which occupied most of the kitchen counter. He intended to make Vespers, the famous James Bond vodka martini from Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale. “Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet,” Murrow said in his best Bond, which wasn’t very good. “Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large, thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?”

  He’d just located the bottle of Kina Lillet when he caught sight of the New York Guardian newspaper lying off to the side. His attention was drawn to the top headline, Russians Implicated in St. Patrick’s Crisis. Groaning, he read the first couple of paragraphs beneath Ariadne Stupenagel’s byline.

  A Russian agent allegedly working with the Islamic terrorists who took over St. Patrick’s Cathedral and held the Pope hostage was captured by U.S. federal agents inside the cathedral last month at the conclusion of the hostage crisis, according to a well-placed source.

  The public was originally led to believe that all the terrorists involved in the plot had been killed inside the cathedral, except for criminal mastermind Andrew Kane, who escaped only to drown in the Harlem River.

  However, a separate government source close to the investigation, who asked to remain anonymous, confirmed that a “person of interest” had been taken into custody near the cathedral rectory.

  Asked if the person of interest was one of the terrorists, the only response was “damn straight she was.”

  Russian government officials deny that any of their agents were in the cathedral when it was stormed by federal agents. And U.S. officials have declined to comment on the record. But the first source identified the “person of interest” as former Soviet KGB agent and current member of the Russian secret police Nadya Malovo….

  Murrow rubbed his eyes, hoping that it might produce a miracle that would make the story disappear, but it was still there when he looked again. He decided to add an extra jigger of vodka to the shaker. His boss, Butch Karp, was sure to assume that he, loyal and tight-lipped aide-de-camp Gilbert Murrow, was one of the unnamed sources. Karp, who’d recently been released from the hospital, was already too fond of accusing him of “sleeping with the enemy,” a journalist, and this was sure to add fuel to that fire.

  Karp had a love-hate relationship with Ariadne that went back decades, before Murrow was even on the scene. Part of it was that Karp considered most journalists in the same light as he did porn stars and politicians; part of it was that Ariadne had been Marlene’s college roommate and there was the inevitable friction when a man came between two female friends. Sometimes when Butch and Ariadne squared off, it was all that Murrow—who at five foot eight was four inches shorter than Stupenagel and nine inches shorter than Karp—could do to step between them without being physically injured.

  Karp had been surprised, and not thrilled, when Murrow and Ariadne had become “an item.” He’d warned Murrow that she was a vamp—having allegedly bedded crown princes, athletes, and dictators (word had it that she’d broken Fidel’s heart) to get her stories. But other than raising an eyebrow, he had not continued with his dissection of her character when Murrow politely but firmly let it be known that he did not appreciate any aspersions on his girlfriend’s character.

  In fact, Karp had even been willing to admit over the past couple of months that as journalists went, Ariadne was not the worst of the lot. She did not burn her bridges for a scoop. And while she could be a loud and abrasive advocate of the “people’s right to know,” which did not always coincide with Karp’s view of what they should know, she also knew when to keep a secret.

  For the most part, Karp also seemed to believe Murrow when he said that he wasn’t divulging any state secrets during pillow talk. Name, rank, and serial number is all she gets out of me, Murrow had promised.

  I doubt that in a literal sense, but I’ll take your word for it if it means not having to hear all the squishy details, Karp had replied, but with a smile.

  The truth was that Murrow knew that she was working on another story about the attack, but he purposefully didn’t ask what it was about. Nor did he know where she was getting her information. He didn’t want to know. As a couple, they had an agreement: he wouldn’t talk with her about anything confidential from the DAO, and she wouldn’t stop asking him questions and promising exotic sexual favors if he answered them. So far he’d kept his side of the bargain. Then again, because she’d been generous with the favors on what she suspiciously referred to as her “investment plan,” his resolve had never been really tested.

  One of Ariadne’s earlier stories about the St. Patrick’s Cathedral attack indicated that the terrorists had helped Kane escape.

  Sources say that the plan was for Kane to then assume the identity of a federal Homeland Security agent—including plastic surgery to aid his disguise—and breach the security surrounding the Pope’s visit.

  Having been deprived of his vast wealth by District Attorney Karp’s motions to freeze his assets after being indicted, Kane attempted to ransom the Pope for one billion dollars, which he demanded from the Vatican Bank.

  The Islamic terrorists at first demanded that Russia withdraw its troops from the Muslim-dominated state of Chechnya. However, they soon revealed that their real mission was to pull off an act of terrorism so shocking and heinous that it would rival the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center.

  The cathedral was rigged with plastic explosives set to go off after Kane made his escape on the word of Palestinian terrorist Samira Azzam. The suicide mission would have been accomplished, except for the quick action of Marlene Ciampi, the district attorney’s wife and a security expert. Along with other concerned citizens and federal agents, she prevented the murder of the Pope by Azzam and the demolition of the cathedral. All of the terrorists, including Azzam, were killed.

  The rest of the media, of course, had had a field day with the events. But it was Stupenagel who’d broke the definitive story on what had occurred at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which had also been particularly critical of the Department of Homeland Security.

  In the aftermath of the attack, there’d been a lot of finger-pointing at both the department and the FBI, each blaming the other for security lapses. However, Ariadne’s story had revealed that it was the Homeland Security department that Kane had infiltrated. The breach not only had exposed the Pope and the hostages in St. Patrick’s to a terrorism attack, but also had resulted in the earlier deaths of several federal agents trying to capture Kane in Aspen, Colorado.

  According to a Department of Homeland Security press release issued in response, the agent whose identity Kane had assumed had come from another agency—the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives—and therefore wasn’t personally known to Jon Ellis, the assistant director of special operations for the department. Ellis had been responsible for directing his agency’s efforts to find Kane, as well as providing antiterrorism security for the Pope’s visit, and he’d been taking the heat in the press for what had happened.

  Public pressure mounted on the government after Ariadne’s stories began to appear, and a U.S. senator from Montana, Tom McCullum, had been calling for a congressional hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee and threatening to subpoena “if necessary” the directors of Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA, and others to testify. However, McCullum was in the minority party and so far his demands had been stymied by the majority party and the administration as “not in the best interest of national security.”

  Ariadne’s last story had been published shortly before Karp was shot. After he recovered, Karp had not complained about the story. In fact, his off-the-record indication was that he was pleased that the information had come out.

  Then Ariadne’s second story was published when Karp was still in the hospital. In it, the complexity of K
ane’s plot was revealed. According to Ariadne’s anonymous sources, Emil Stavros, a powerful banker and political kingmaker, was being blackmailed by Kane to wire the ransom money into offshore bank accounts. Kane had known of the murder of Stavros’s wife and used it to force the man to cooperate or else spend the rest of his life in prison.

  If that wasn’t enough of a conspiracy, Ariadne had then linked Stavros to Rachel Rachman’s campaign and implied that the assassination attempt on Karp had been motivated by revenge, not to secure the election for herself. The big question was—with Kane dead—who else would have had the motive and the juice to persuade Rachman to pull the trigger?

  After Karp was shot, Murrow had gone into his office to secure whatever papers might have been left out and noted the school photos of the murdered children spread like a fan on the desk. Next to them was a yellow legal-sized notebook with a series of names and incidents with lines leading from one to the other. He’d studied the pad for a minute but concluded only that the names and lines were connected to the photographs.

  Even in the hospital, Karp kept working the case. The day before he was released, he’d called and asked Murrow to quietly run the name Jamys Kellagh through the CCIC national crime computer. He’d had a few hits, including a Kansas City bank robber named James Kellough, who’d since had a sex change. However, none of the names matched the spelling, nor seemed to strike a chord with Karp, who was playing his cards close to the vest and didn’t volunteer why he was interested in the name. But Murrow knew it had to do with the yellow legal pad and the murdered children.

  While he had not criticized Ariadne’s stories, Karp made it very clear to his inner circle that no one in the DAO was to comment to the press or provide information, even on background, regarding what they were referring to as the “The Kane Affair.” He’d emphasized his point by giving Murrow the evil eye.