Capture (Butch Karp Thrillers)

by Tanenbaum, Robert K.

  Both missions had failed in their ultimate goals, but not completely. The psychological effect of the attacks was almost as important as whether they had succeeded. Especially to the Sons of Man, she thought.

  Just like her Russian bosses, the American power-group was using the bogeyman of fanatical Islamic terrorists to prime the public into accepting a takeover of the government by highly placed men in politics, the military, law, and business. They were already on the precipice; now all that was needed was one last nudge and frightened Americans would abdicate their precious rights in favor of safety.

  A former KGB agent, Malovo had found a more lucrative calling after the fall of the Soviet Union working for a confederacy of mob bosses, corrupt politicians, and former military officers. Then the shared aims and strategies of her employers and the Sons of Man brought her into contact with the latter, especially a former SOM council member named Andrew Kane, a man she detested personally but admired for his ruthless pursuit of power.

  Malovo’s musings were interrupted when the driver failed to avoid a pothole, causing her to hit her head on the roof of the truck. “!” she cursed. The man apologized profusely, wiping beads of sweat from his brow and glancing nervously at his passenger.

  Most of the men in the truck usually saw women as nothing more than chattel. Certainly not mujahedeen, holy warriors. Yes, the occasional, usually dimwitted female could be persuaded to wear a martyr’s vest beneath her robes and blow herself up at a police checkpoint. But even then they were controlled and used by men as nothing more than a means to an end.

  However, none of the men would have dared put Ajmaani in that class. She was a beautiful woman, somewhere in her mid-to late forties—as an orphan, even she wasn’t exactly sure—with short blond hair and azure blue eyes set wide apart above her high cheekbones, courtesy of her Slavic ancestors. She purposely dressed in what she knew these conservative religious men would consider inappropriate, provocative clothing—form-fitting pants and blouses that she would leave partly unbuttoned to draw their attention to her breasts. She enjoyed the anger, and lust, she saw on their faces, knowing they were too afraid to say what they were thinking.

  They were all aware of her penchant for summarily executing anyone who irritated her or got in her way. All of them had known men who enjoyed killing—some were those men—but no one they’d ever met reveled in death quite the way she did. She’d been known to kill—usually with her knife but willing to use whatever was available—men for what she called insubordination, which was anything she said it was. Even the toughest of them had been bled like sheep on a holy day.

  They feared her even more than they respected her. And that’s exactly what she wanted. A fearful man hesitates before striking, which is long enough to kill him. A man who respects you will wait for the right moment, and then strike without thinking.

  Malovo was getting tired of the company of such men. She’d never believed in any social movements. Lectures from her political teachers at public school in Moscow about revolution and freeing the masses from the yoke of capitalism had left her cold.

  Fortunately, her old KGB instructors were practical men who used ideology only as a tool to control others. They didn’t care what she believed in, only that she was smart, vicious, and obeyed orders without question. She wasn’t motivated by ideas, she was driven by lust—for power, for money, for death and dominion over others, and occasionally, for other women. Because of this she was in Dagestan, preparing one more time to risk her life.

  Malovo sighed, though she was careful to turn away from the driver so that he did not notice. She was tired. Not of the killing; she still found satisfaction in that. But of risking her own life, the only thing in the world she deemed precious. There had been several near misses of late, and deep in her gut there was a feeling that time was running out.

  If the attack on the stock exchange had gone down as planned, she would have been officially retired, traveling the world, living off the millions in gold that would have been deposited on her behalf. No paper transfers. Paper money would have been worthless with the U.S. and world economies crashing. But gold, gold was always a girl’s best friend.

  Unfortunately, the plan had failed. Thanks, in part, to Ivgeny Karchovski, her former lover and now mortal enemy.

  The assassin’s reverie ended abruptly when the driver started honking the horn. Looking ahead, she saw that the convoy she was in was barely crawling around an obstruction. A horse-drawn wagon piled high with hay was partly blocking the road, one of its wheels having fallen off and rolled into a ditch.

  As the truck drew close to the cart, the farmer turned away to berate his horse, which still pulled at its traces and rolled its eyes wildly. The farmer was a tall, stooped man dressed in the local peasant garb, as was his stout wife, who in the conservative style of the countryside had covered her head and most of her face with a shawl.

  Malovo couldn’t see the man’s face, not that she particularly cared, but for a moment her eyes locked with the other woman’s. The gold-flecked gray eyes had a Slavic cast to them, not unusual in that part of the world, which had seen a multitude of invaders, from Greeks and Huns to Mongols and Russians.

  They exchanged a look for only a moment, and she’d seen nothing in the other woman’s eyes except a dim curiosity. Then the woman turned away and started yelling at her husband in Avar, one of the three main languages of Dagestan. Malovo only knew a few words of Avar but gathered that the woman was comparing him to the rear end of their horse.

  What a life, she thought, sneering. Married at puberty to be a brood sow for some Neolithic caveman. She probably squats in the field to deliver the next generation of subhumans. Someday all such worthless people—the peasants, the Muslim fanatics, the beggars and cripples—will be eliminated or enslaved.

  While the plan to destroy the U.S. economy was brilliant in concept, and would’ve been devastating if it had worked—the American public would have had no choice but to turn to strong men willing to take control during a time of crisis—it was too complicated. Too much reliance on one domino crashing into another, tumbling into a pattern leading to a disaster.

  Malovo much preferred more direct action. Which was why she thought Operation Flashfire, a plan set in motion by the failure of the stock exchange attack, was much more likely to succeed. Not that it was a simple strategy—there were timetables and a certain amount of reliance on the abilities of her coconspirators—but overall there were many fewer, interrelated steps.

  However, there was one major glitch. The presence of Amir al-Sistani, the despicable little toad who insisted he be called the Sheik, was integral to both plans, which had come as a surprise. Without anyone’s knowledge within the Sons of Man, or her current employer, he’d set up a rescue operation in the event he was apprehended by U.S. authorities if the stock exchange attack failed.

  For the second plan to be implemented, his required presence had ensured that maximum efforts would be taken to secure his release from U.S. custody, which wouldn’t have proved too difficult to accomplish. The Sons of Man were a powerful organization with tentacles running throughout the U.S. political, legal, military, and business worlds; reasons would have been found to turn him over to another government for “prosecution” that would never occur. Or something would go wrong with the U.S. case against him, forcing it to be thrown out on some technicality and requiring his deportation to a friendly country.

  However, for all of his cunning, Amir al-Sistani had not counted on falling into the hands of a madman who answered to no government. Malovo’s eyes narrowed as she thought about David Grale. Her spies told her that Grale was keeping al-Sistani prisoner, stalling the implementation of Operation Flashfire. The meeting she was driving to in an obscure village in the Caucasus Mountains was an attempt by her employer to get around his absence.

  The convoy swung around a bend in the road, and she saw what she presumed was the village, a collection of a couple dozen mud-walled and thatch
-roofed houses set on both sides of the road at the bottom of a hill. She noted the lack of locals, who she presumed had fled, were in hiding, or lying in mass graves. The only people she saw were armed men on patrol, or standing idly by, breaking off their conversations as the trucks entered the village.

  The convoy stopped in front of the largest of the houses, the dust hardly settling before several of the men she would be talking to walked out of the doorway. Idiots, she thought, better to remain in the building and wait for me rather than come out into the open unnecessarily.

  She scanned the surrounding hillsides, noting the distant figures of armed men standing sentinel. Everything appeared to be reasonably safe, but she still waited until her cadre of bodyguards from the other trucks had surrounded her vehicle to shield her from sight. Only then did she open the door and step out.

  Two miles back along the road, the stout peasant woman complained to her “husband,” but in Russian, not Avar, which he did not speak. “Oh my God, I’m sweating like a pig in all of these clothes,” Lucy Karp said.

  Ivgeny Karchovski stood rubbing his back, which ached from stooping over in the posture of an overworked farmer. Six feet four, he usually stood straight as one of the local fir trees. “Don’t complain, dorogaya moya, people see what they expect to see,” he replied as he removed the horse from its harness. “Even someone as perceptive as Nadya saw only two stupid peasants, a bent old man and ‘fat’ older woman.” He hesitated. “That was her, wasn’t it? I glanced when they first approached but couldn’t let her see my face.”

  “How nice! You called me ‘my dear,’ Uncle Iv.” Lucy smiled. “Dorogaya moya has a nice sound to it. But yeah, it was her. For a moment, I was afraid that she recognized me even though she’s only seen me twice, briefly, and this time I had my face covered.”

  Ivgeny grimaced. “I didn’t like Jaxon sending you on this mission. I know Nadya—unfortunately all too well and better than anyone, and I know how dangerous she can be. She has a sixth sense about danger; it’s how she’s lived this long.”

  “Yeah, well, all I can say is your taste in women is questionable.” Lucy wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “Besides, someone who knew the local language and wouldn’t be a dead giveaway had to come. You don’t know Avar or Lezgi, and your Russian pretty much pegs you as raised in and around Moscow, not Dagestan. And none of the others are any better at the language. Besides, I’m a covert operative employed by the government of the United States and a certain amount of risk comes with the job—though if I’m caught, my story is that I’m an interpreter for a United Nations fact-finding team who has lost her way.”

  “Uncle Iv? How impudent the young are becoming,” Karchovski replied. He studied the young woman in front of him with admiration. Her gift for languages was astounding. Even the men who worked for his family’s “import-export” business in Dagestan swore that her Avar and Lezgi—ethnic languages of the region and spoken worldwide by perhaps a million people—were that of a native speaker. Several times on this mission her ability to speak the local dialect had saved them from suspicion; Russian was spoken in Dagestan, but Russians were not popular.

  Yet, he was still uncomfortable with exposing her to danger. She was, in fact, a relative—not a niece but a cousin, the daughter of his first cousin Roger Karp, the district attorney of New York.

  “My taste in women? Nadya was as beautiful as she was dangerous when she was young…a very stimulating combination to a lonely army officer fighting the mujahedeen in Afghanistan. And she was good at hiding the corruption in her soul.”

  “The corruption in her soul? You Russians are so poetic,” Lucy scoffed, rolling her eyes. “I think a better description might be ‘hiding her sociopathic tendencies.’ But enough about your past conquests of dangerously ill women, isn’t it time to tell the boys that she’s on the way?”

  Ivgeny held up a small electronic device. “I already have,” he replied. “As soon as you confirmed it was the…target.” He gave the horse a whack on the rump to send it trotting off down the road. “Let’s go.”

  The pair left the disabled cart in the road and walked across the field to the barn of an abandoned farm. Inside, they changed quickly out of the peasant garb and into the Westernized clothing of city dwellers out for a drive in the country.

  Lucy opened the door of the barn further, looking up toward a distant hill. “Good hunting, my darling,” she whispered. “And be safe.” She turned as Ivgeny wheeled a Ural 750 motorcycle with sidecar out of one of the stalls in the back.

  Karchovski pulled on an old-fashioned leather helmet, swung his long leg over the motorcycle, and started the engine. He revved the engine and grinned. “So, I look like James Dean, no?”

  “Uh, no,” Lucy replied. “More like Boris Karloff in leather. Besides, who said you get to drive?”

  “Such impudence! And like hell I would put my life in the hands of such a ëhok Now have a seat, it’s time to leave.”

  Lucy laughed and got in the sidecar, pulling on her own helmet as Karchovski put the motorcycle in gear and roared out of the barn. At the road they stopped and looked in the direction Malovo’s truck had gone, then Karchovski turned the other direction and raced off up the road.

  6

  AS THE PREMONITION OF AN UNSEEN THREAT FADED FOR THE moment, Karp motioned for the detective to remain in the sedan and walked around to the front passenger side. “Good morning, Detective Neary,” he said as he opened the door and got in next to the driver.

  “Morning, sir,” Detective Al Neary replied without a lot of enthusiasm.

  “What’s new?” Karp asked, noting a crumpled copy of the sports section from the New York Post lying on the seat between them.

  “You mean, other than the Knicks still suck, the Jets are playing like horseshit, and the Rangers are goin’ nowhere but down the toilet?” the young man replied in his thick New York Irish accent, then shrugged. “Not much.”

  “Pretty much the same with the Yankees,” Karp commiserated.

  “I’d thank you to never mention those bums in this vehicle again,” Neary replied. “After that meltdown in September…and to that bunch of stiffs from Boston…Jesus H. Christ on a stick! ’Scuse my language, but I’ve sworn off baseball.”

  “But aren’t you the guy who named your kids after Yankee players?”

  “Yeah, Lou Gehrig Neary, Joe DiMaggio Neary, and Micki Mantle Neary…. Micki’s a girl, so me and the wife spelled it with two i’s instead of an e-y.”

  “I’m sure she’ll appreciate the gesture someday.”

  “It was that or name her Babe Ruth Neary. But I didn’t want a bunch of guys runnin’ around her high school callin’ my little girl Babe. I mighta had to shoot one of ’em.”

  “Well, then I’m glad you chose Micki with two i’s. Our caseload at the DAO can’t handle another cop brutality trial.”

  The short green-eyed detective laughed. “Yeah, and I wouldn’t do so well in the joint. So where to, chief?”

  Karp turned toward the younger man and wiggled his eyebrows. “How’d you like a piece of the best cherry cheese coffee cake in the world?”

  The detective put the Lincoln into Drive and lurched away from the curb. “Got to be Il Buon Pane at Third and Twenty-ninth.”

  Karp was impressed. “You’re right. But how’d you know?”

  Neary looked at him like he was nuts. “You’re askin’ a cop how he knows where to find pastry and a good, hot cuppa joe?”

  “Yeah, okay, I’d expect nothing less from my NYPD guardians,” Karp conceded. “But it’s a small place so I didn’t think anybody else had heard of it.”

  “Well, actually, you’re probably right, unless you live in the neighborhood or someone turned you on to the place,” Neary admitted. “But I used to walk that beat when I was first comin’ up on the force, and Moishe’s one of those old-school guys who still believes in free coffee and a snack for the cops. Makes the bad guys think twice about hittin’ a place that’s popular wi
th New York’s finest. Go ahead, rob the banks. Kidnap the women. Beat the crap out of each other. But never, ever roll a place where cops get free eats. Not if you want to keep your ass out of Riker’s Island.”

  “Then Il Buon Pane it is,” Karp chuckled. “And make it snappy. I’m starting to drool all over one of my favorite Father’s Day ties.”

  Ten minutes later, Neary had successfully battled morning rush hour and let Karp out in front of the little bakery.

  “Sure you don’t want to come in?” Karp asked.

  “Nah, I’m going to stick with the car,” the detective answered. “My luck the frickin’ city street department would come along and tow it just out of spite. But if you’d send out a piece of the cherry cheese coffee cake and a cuppa, I’d be much obliged. I might even stick around and give you a ride to the office…. On second thought, make it a piece of the blueberry cheese coffee cake. I’ve heard blueberries are good for you.”

  “Yeah, blueberry cheese coffee cake has got to be healthy. I’ll make sure you get a piece. But after that you don’t have to wait, I’ll be about thirty minutes and I can catch a cab…”

  “Take your time, I ain’t going nowhere. Clay would have my ass. Besides, I want to reread the story about last night’s Knicks game so that I can get my blood pressure to spike again…. Those dumb-ass wastes of space…”

  Karp got out of the car and stood there for a moment looking at the bakery, its big windows filled with every sort of delicacy, from many-tiered wedding cakes to pastries to loaves of breads. A vent above the window, apparently leading directly back to the ovens, poured a delicious aroma over the sidewalk that chased away any thoughts of a cold winter.

  It never ceased to amaze him that a place like Il Buon Pane—a two-story, redbrick affair probably built sometime around the beginning of the twentieth century—could still exist on a busy intersection in the heart of Manhattan. Although lease prices had fallen after 9-11 and the subsequent exodus to supposedly safer havens on the other side of the East and Hudson rivers, it seemed incredible that an old neighborhood bakery could pay the rent and support its owners and their employees.