Malice kac-19

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  "You have a point, Bryan," Sean agreed. "But when will it be safe again? I heard that they didn't announce Mr. McCullum was going to be the grand marshal until the last minute because there's been threats. But he's here now and that takes courage… Ach, look lively, lads, we're moving forward again. Time to pucker up and blow."

  Lucy was suddenly besieged with voices. He was real critical about it…for the greater good…silence the critic…there's been threats.

  She flipped open her cell phone and tried to call Jojola. She thought the phone was answered but she couldn't hear over the din of the bagpipes. Standing on her toes, she tried to see over the crowd, but Jojola and Tran were nowhere in sight.

  "I think they're going to try to kill Senator McCullum," she shouted to Ned.

  "What?" Ned shouted back.

  "I said," she yelled, "I think they're going to try to kill McCullum!" She pointed at the stage and pantomimed shooting. "There!"

  "What?"

  Lucy rolled her eyes. "Oh, never mind," she shouted, and started to move quickly through the lines of bagpipers.

  "Hey, lass, wait your turn," one of the pipers called out.

  Lucy ignored the shouts and confused or miffed looks and pushed on until only the drill team and the drum major stood between her and the viewing platform. The six-member team stood in three pairs, each pair tossing their rifles back and forth in cadence to the drumbeat and on command of the drum major who faced them.

  On command, the pipers and drummers stopped at the same moment while the drill team caught their rifles and snapped to attention, facing the viewing stand. The dignitaries and the crowd cheered and whistled as the drum major continued to shout commands followed by the instantaneous movement of the team.

  "Shoulder arms!" The team brought the guns to their shoulders.

  "Present arms!" The team held their guns forward as the drum major walked stiff-legged down the line for a cursory inspection. As he passed, each rifleman twirled his weapon and brought it up to shoulder arms.

  Everyone except the man on the end closest to Lucy and Ned. She saw him suddenly pull down the bolt of the rifle and then slam it forward with such intent that she knew what was going to happen. Not knowing what else to do, she ran forward and shouted, "Myr shegin dy ve, bee eh!"

  The assassin stopped and turned to see who'd shouted the motto of the Sons of Man. He only knew a smattering of the old tongue, but this phrase he knew because it had concluded every call from handler Jamys Kellagh. However, this time the words had come from the Irish girl who was rushing toward him with her boyfriend close behind.

  "Stop! McCullum is no longer the target," she shouted.

  The assassin's eyes narrowed. She didn't use the password to call off the mission. And besides, it would have never come from a woman, not with Jamys Kellagh on the viewing stand.

  "Wrong," he said, and swung back toward the dais, raising the butt of the rifle to his shoulder. No one on the stand yet realized that something was wrong. His target remained sitting, an easy shot. He started to squeeze the trigger but an instant too late; someone struck him from behind and threw off his aim. Instead, he was looking down the barrel at the stunned face of the drum major when the gun fired.

  Stewart spun away from his attacker, the girl's boyfriend, who swung his fist and landed a glancing blow. He struck back, catching the boy on the jaw with the butt of the rifle, sending him crashing to the ground.

  Enraged, he aimed the rifle at the boyfriend and was about to shoot him when someone screamed. He became aware of other screams and shouts and remembered that his mission was to kill the senator, and his window of opportunity was slipping away.

  In fact, McCullum was being hustled off the stage by security officers along with the other dignitaries, some of whom had decided it was every man for himself and were scrambling in different directions.

  The crowd backed away from Stewart, however, giving a clear field of fire. But then a dark-haired plainclothes officer positioned himself in front of the fleeing dignitaries, trying to get a clear shot at him through the crowd. The assassin readjusted and shot the officer, who went down. He swung the gun back to find his target.

  "Hey, piece of shit!" The voice came out of nowhere, as did the flying roundhouse kick that caught him square on the side of the head. Dazed but snarling like a lion separated from its kill, he turned on the small Asian man who'd kicked him but fallen to the ground from the effort.

  The assassin pointed the rifle to kill the second attacker. And would have, except he was struck such a blow in the back that it seemed to have momentarily stopped his body from responding like the trained killing machine he'd worked so hard to become. He tried to pull the trigger, but his finger wouldn't respond. Then his arms stopped working altogether and the rifle clattered to the ground. He reached behind and felt for the object that protruded from his back directly over his spine, but he couldn't reach it and collapsed to the ground.

  "Goddamn, you slowing down or what!" Tran shouted at Jojola. "He almost shot me!"

  "Maybe if you brushed up on your kicks you wouldn't fall down every time," Jojola retorted. "Besides, if I let him shoot you, who would pay for my kid's college education a dollar at a time?"

  "BOTH OF YOU GET YOUR HANDS UP IN THE AIR!" a nervous police sergeant shouted. He and a dozen others had their drawn guns pointed at the small Asian man and what appeared to be a long-haired Indian. He looked at the body twitching on the ground, the handle of a big-ass knife sticking out of his back. Another body was lying off to the side-the drum major.

  "Oh, bullshit," Tran yelled back at Jojola as he raised his hands. "You try kicking some giant lard-ass as hard as I did and see if you stay on your feet. Besides, I think I pulled something in my groin."

  "Getting old," Jojola said, laughing.

  Lucy rushed up to the police sergeant, who wasn't quite sure what to do about the debate. "Please put your guns down," she said. "He's a police officer."

  "Which one?"

  "The one with the long hair. He's the chief of police at the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico."

  "And who are you, pray tell?"

  "Lucy Karp. I'm Butch Karp's daughter."

  "Yeah, and who's the other guy?" the sergeant said, then spoke into the microphone on his shoulder. "Can we get some backup and an ambulance, please? I got a regular carnival going on here."

  Lucy realized that Tran, a gangster, might have warrants out for his arrest. "I don't know," she said. "I think he is just a bystander who helped stop that guy."

  "That guy" had stopped twitching. The sergeant put his gun down and signaled for the other officers to do the same just as Espey Jaxon ran up, flashed a badge at the cops, and turned to Lucy.

  "Are you okay?" he asked. "What in the hell are you doing here?"

  "Trying to save Senator McCullum's life," Lucy said without looking him in the eye. "And find out who killed my friend Cian."

  Before Jaxon could respond, Jon Ellis ran up. "What are you doing here, Jaxon?"

  "My firm was hired to provide security for the archbishop," Jaxon replied. "After the fiasco this fall, the church wasn't taking chances."

  "I bet that cost a pretty penny," Ellis said sarcastically. "VIP rent-a-cops don't come cheap."

  Lucy watched the emotions play over Jaxon's face. He's angry and hurt, she thought, angry at Ellis and hurt because of me.

  The tension was broken by a loud groan and the drum major sat up. He'd fainted the moment he saw the rifle pointed at him, which had saved his life. A police officer picked up his bearskin hat, which had fallen off, and was sticking a finger in a hole made by the bullet. "Three inches farther down and you'd be a dead man," the officer said.

  Lucy turned to Jaxon. "Was that Agent Tavizon who got shot?"

  "Yes, but the bullet just grazed his temple. Other than being stunned and a little bloody, he's a lucky boy who'll live to fight another day," Jaxon replied. "I thought you were in New Mexico."

  "I was," Lucy answered.
>
  Jaxon waited for more of an answer, but when it wasn't forthcoming he added, "You want to tell me what you're doing here and, once again, arriving in the nick of time?"

  Lucy remained silent, then Ellis took her by the arm. "I believe that's my line, Jaxon. Thanks, but we'll handle the debriefing on this." His men surrounded Tran and Jojola, and another was helping Ned Blanchet to his feet.

  Lucy looked over her shoulder at Jaxon as she was being led away. He was standing over the assassin's body. He glanced up and their eyes met. She couldn't tell what she saw in his expression before he quickly looked down again, but his body seemed to sag from some unseen weight.

  22

  It wasn't until hours after the shooting that Karp heard about the assassination attempt. He, O'Toole, Meyers, and Fulton had been holed up in a room at the Grove Hotel in downtown Boise reviewing the case, going over strategy, and running through O'Toole's testimony and what he could expect on cross-examination.

  Meanwhile, Marlene had been coordinating the various needs and requests of the 221B Baker Street Irregulars, who would be arriving in Sawtooth a few days before the trial. "We're having a hard time getting the right equipment to the site. It will be there, but it might not be until the day the trial starts," she'd told Karp that day before they heard the news from back East. "Sorry, but we may be pushing it to help you."

  "That's okay," he'd replied. "I hope you find Maria Santacristina, but we're not counting on it. I'm going into this thinking we're going to have to dance with the dates we brought to the ball. But I'll save you a spot on my dance card for the second day if you think you can keep up."

  "Oh, I can keep up, buster," Marlene responded. "If I remember correctly, it's Marlene, ten, Butch, zero, for who quit first out of our last ten dances?"

  "Who's counting," Karp said, and laughed. "Besides, I wasn't talking about that kind of dancing."

  Not until he got back up to his room later and turned on the television did he learn about the St. Patrick's Day Parade events in New York City. Stunned, he'd glanced at the telephone and saw that the message light was blinking, which had turned out to be a call from Lucy-saying she was all right and would be in touch shortly-and another from Marlene, who was in Sawtooth, angrily scolding him for turning off his cell phone and then relaying the news from Manhattan.

  They tried to assassinate a U.S. senator! Of all the terrorist acts that had been attempted or accomplished in recent years, this one struck Karp as more a thrust right to the heart of what America stood for than all the bloody massacres. Not worse, nothing was worse than the taking of innocent lives, nothing more reprehensible than murder in the name of God. But those events were easily seen for what they were: evil, senseless-serving only to harden the resolve of the West to stand up to terrorists.

  This, however, had been an attempt to shake fundamental American values by trying to silence a voice that was warning the American people not to let fear carve away at their civil liberties. A voice that was demanding the truth regarding what was really behind Kane's escape and the attack at St. Patrick's Cathedral, the bombing of the Black Sea Cafe, the murder of Cian Magee, and the attempted hijacking of the Staten Island Ferry.

  It made him wonder if maybe the conspiracy nuts were in some way right, maybe the enemy within was more dangerous than the enemy without. After all, what did it matter if the terrorists were defeated if there was nothing left worth saving? If the Constitution could be ignored, or shelved for convenience, if a senator could be selected for assassination because he demanded the truth, why was he, Butch Karp, in a federal courtroom in Boise fighting for one man's right to those constitutional protections?

  Officially, the Department of Homeland Security had released a preliminary report stating that Paul Stewart, a disgraced member of the NYPD, had been acting on his own. "It appears that Stewart had not selected any particular person," according to the press release. "But that he intended to shoot 'targets of opportunity' in an attempt to avenge his dismissal from the New York Police Department and gain publicity."

  Neighbors of Stewart in the Bronx apartment complex he lived in had been quoted by the media as saying the shooter was an angry man whose wife had left him following his dismissal from the NYPD. The reports noted that Stewart had been kicked off the force after being implicated in the burgeoning "No Prosecution" files investigation by the DAO.

  "He told me that he was going to get even with the city," an anonymous man was quoted as saying in the Times.

  Stewart's past and alleged statements had led to widespread speculation that Stewart's intended targets had been the mayor and the chief of police. "He may have also hoped to shoot District Attorney Butch Karp, who he apparently blamed for his dismissal," the Times story reported.

  Karp, of course, knew better than the "official version" released by the Homeland Security Department. He'd been told the entire story by Lucy and filled in on other details by Jojola. However, Jon Ellis had requested that no one contradict the department "while we investigate Lucy's information about the Sons of Man and see if we can locate them."

  The department press release had also indicated that Stewart's plot had been foiled by "concerned citizens, who acted bravely and swiftly in the face of great danger to themselves." The citizens had not been named "out of regard for their safety, in the unlikely but possible event that Stewart had an accomplice."

  Even Stupenagel had not yet picked up on Lucy's involvement. Television clips of the assassination attempt had been played ad nauseam. However, most of the cameras had concentrated on the viewing platform or had swung around wildly in the confused melee and had difficulty picking out the shooter and the "concerned citizens" until it was over. Then the television cameras had focused on shots of Stewart lying on the ground with the hilt of a knife protruding from his back and federal agents escorting several people away from the scene with blankets over their heads to protect their identities.

  One week removed from St. Patrick's Day, Karp stood in a federal courtroom in Boise, Idaho, still trying to come to grips with the enormity of the attempt to kill Thomas McCullum. He was a few minutes from the beginning of voir dire, the jury selection process for the O'Toole trial, but his mind was back in Manhattan.

  If the assassination attempt and the various other terrorist acts associated with it weren't enough to worry about, Manhattan was still serving up plenty of other "normal" crimes to keep the DAO hopping while he was gone. Two days before the O'Toole trial was to begin, Assistant District Attorney Harry Kipman, who was acting DA while he was on leave, had called to let him know that they had a new high-profile homicide case.

  Charlie Campbell, the Manhattan borough president and a candidate for the Eighth Congressional District, had returned home to his Upper West Side brownstone to find that his three young children-one of them an infant-were missing. His wife, Jessica Campbell, who was discovered asleep in the master bedroom, woke and happily announced that she'd saved their children from Satan and that they were in heaven.

  They haven't found the bodies, Kipman had said. And the press is all over this one big-time. They're already running stories that Mrs. Campbell suffered from postpartum depression and had attempted suicide after her second child's birth.

  Where's she now? Karp had asked.

  Locked up at Bellevue, Kipman had replied. She wouldn't say what she did with the kids, except that they're in "a better place." And now her husband has her lawyered up. No murder weapon either. Oh, and here's irony for those of you out in Idaho, the family station wagon is gone, too, presumably on the road to heaven. Not to be too obtuse, but I'm guessing we're looking at an insanity defense.

  "I'd bet on it, Karp had replied. And it's not going to be pretty if we pursue multiple murder charges against a popular borough president's wife suffering from postpartum depression.

  Karp had told Kipman to handle the case like any other homicide. And no one's to say anything to the press, he'd added.

  Now he needed to concentrate on
helping Meyers and O'Toole. Early that morning, a Wednesday, he rose before the sun was up and went down to the hotel's workout room. He hit the weights hard and then spent thirty minutes on the stationary bike, working up a sweat while he filed away the happenings in Manhattan so that his mind would be clear in court. His wounded leg ached as he showered, ate a room service breakfast, and then walked to the courthouse. But the pain seemed to help him focus on the present so that by the time he reached the courthouse steps and saw O'Toole and Meyers waiting for him, he was ready for battle.

  They tried to assassinate a U.S. senator! With an effort, Karp turned his attention to the front of the courtroom, where a moment later federal district court judge Sam Allen entered and immediately asked for the jury pool to be escorted in and seated in the pews.

  Tall and rangy, Allen was a native son of Idaho who when not in the black robes of his profession preferred a cowboy hat and boots more fitting for his ranch west of town. He spoke in a slow, measured Western drawl, but Karp had found him to be sharp as a Spanish spur, to stick with the Western imagery.

  Allen had the bailiff call out twelve names from the pool. Those called rose and made their way to the jury box, where the judge first questioned them to see if any had sufficient reason to be excused, and then told Karp he could begin his questioning.

  Karp introduced himself and "my co-counsel, Richard Meyers, and our client, Coach Mikey O'Toole." He then began to set the stage for what he hoped would be the theme of the trial. But instead of the usual mundane personal opinion questions asked of each juror, he'd addressed the twelve potential jurors who'd been seated with a series of questions. At the same time, he made sure that his voice was loud enough for the rest of the jury pool to hear. "How many of you have ever felt you were falsely accused of something?"