Fury (The Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi Series Book 17)

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Another, younger man walked out from behind the scaffolding. Al-Sistani couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The young man wore his handgun slung low like a stupid American cowboy.

  “My friend John just called you an asshole, you asshole,” the cowboy said.

  “Yep, looks like it’s over…asshole,” a tall man said, coming out from behind the line of federal agents.

  A wild cheering and the sound of explosions came from above the tunnel. Karp looked up and smiled. “Sounds like the ball just dropped.”

  A short woman with dark hair also pushed through the federal agents. “Hey, Butch, how about my New Year’s Eve kiss,” she said and embraced the tall man. “Even if you lied.”

  “Only a little,” Karp said. “I waited a good half hour before I called Jaxon.”

  “Good thing you did,” Jaxon said. “Marlene and her pal were just about toast, not to mention the rest of the city. By the way, where is the Vietnamese guy? Man, he could teach us a few things about guerilla warfare.”

  “He’s gone,” Marlene said. “And you’re right, he could. Now, don’t you think someone should disarm that creep?”

  Al-Sistani still stood with the gun at his side. He considered, for a moment, surrendering; then he thought of a lifetime spent in a federal penitentiary. Kill the Karp boy. Make his Jew parents suffer, he decided and quick as a snake turned to where Khalif was shielding the boy and lifted his gun.

  A shot rang out, but it wasn’t from Al-Sistani’s weapon. So fast that the federal agents and others who saw it later said there was no discernible moment between when Ned Blanchet’s gun was in its holster and when it blew a hole the size of an orange in the terrorist’s head.

  “Holy shit, nice shooting, cowboy,” Jaxon said.

  A small voice came down from the ceiling. “My hero.” The group looked up and began to laugh at the adoring face of Lucy Karp as she looked down on the group like one of the angels in the Sistine Chapel.

  29

  Monday, January 24

  BY THE TIME KARP SAW STUPENAGEL MOVING TOWARD HIM through the lobby of the U.S. District Court building, it was too late to give her the slip.

  “Good morning, Butch,” she said cheerfully, clip-clopping quickly across the granite floors in her high heels to get a pace in front of him. “Want to tell me what you and Special Agent in Charge Jaxon were talking about yesterday? Along with the two other suits who smelled like more feds, only different?”

  Karp knew better than to issue a flat denial. Stupenagel’s sources were too good. So he dissembled. “You can smell the difference between feds?” he said, making a feint to one side, then dodging to the other to get ahead as he moved toward the elevator.

  Stupenagel recognized the ploy as she cursed herself for wearing too tight a skirt this day for good maneuvering and had to fall in behind. “Yeah, they use different kinds of soap,” she replied sarcastically. “I once slept with Jaxon way back when he was just a junior agent, though still pretty damn special, if I remember right—and don’t you ever tell Murrow I said that or I’ll rip your balls off. He was a Lifebuoy type; those other two, I don’t know, maybe Dial, which makes them…you tell me…spooks?”

  Although their relationship had improved over the past year or so, Karp knew not to trust the reporter entirely, especially when there was a big story she wanted. Still, he was always impressed by her deductive reasoning, which ranked right up there with the best detectives he knew.

  “So you going to tell me what’s up?” she asked.

  Karp shrugged. “Just a post–New Year’s Eve briefing about the heightened alert status. But it turned into a pretty quiet night, so just a courtesy call…that’s all.”

  Stupenagel rolled her eyes. “Only one problem with being the most honest man in this city, Karp, and it’s that you couldn’t lie your way out of a paper bag.”

  “Well, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it,” he replied as he reached the elevator door and punched the up button.

  “I don’t suppose it had anything to do with those three heads?” she asked as the door opened and they got on with a small Chinese woman. “Little bird told me that a couple of them were on the most wanted list of terrorists…. Another little bird told me that a whole gang of feds rushed into a Broadway theater under renovation over on Forty-fifth Street an hour or so before midnight on New Year’s Eve and that certain members of the Karp family were seen being led out and whisked away. That entire block was shut down for two weeks after that.”

  The Chinese woman gasped at the word terrorists and punched the button that would let her off on the next floor. A bored-looking lawyer and his client, a thin white teenager with tattoos on his neck and hands, got on. “She told me she was fifteen,” the teen said. “How was I to know she was twelve?”

  Stupenagel started to say something but Karp grabbed her by the arm. “Ow, that hurts,” she complained as he led her off the elevator when they reached the fifth floor.

  “So does the truth, and half-truths can hurt even more,” Karp growled. “Hasn’t anybody ever told you that your mouth runs nonstop?”

  “All the time.” Stupenagel grinned. “In fact, you do. But look, it’s my job to ask questions. Can I help it if people like to tell me things even if they shouldn’t? So I get the word that these three heads belonged to Islamic terrorists. Good. Somebody’s doing the world a favor. But who? And what were these guys up to? Then there’s the feds in your office…things are adding up, Karp, but I’m still missing a few numbers. Come on, help a lady out here.”

  “I might if I could find a lady,” he retorted, saw the hurt look on her face, and softened. “Sorry. Look, Ariadne, you are the best there is at what you do—and I hate to admit this but I’m impressed with your integrity as much as your talent—but this isn’t something I can tell people about, and maybe you shouldn’t either.” He was surprised to see Stupenagel’s eyes get wet.

  “Did you know that was one of maybe three times you’ve ever called me by my first name or said anything nice to me about me and my work? So okay, for now anyway, I’m going to quit pestering you and Jaxon. But I won’t stop digging; it’s my job. And I know you know that and respect me for it.”

  “Don’t get carried away with this buddy stuff,” Karp growled. Then he grinned and gave her a wink. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Ariadne, I got a trial to win.”

  “No problem,” she said. “I’ve got to go check in with the press pool. I’m covering the trial so you better be good, Karp, or I’ll fry your ass.”

  Walking off, Karp heard her laugh. He chuckled himself. He hadn’t been lying…not entirely. Jaxon, Kluge, and Albert had dropped by his office as a courtesy call to fill him in on the final details of the New Year’s Eve escapade.

  A Haz Mat team had been flown up from the FBI campus at Quantico to dismantle the bomb and dispose of the nuclear material. “They had enough to level most of Times Square, not to mention throw up a cloud of radioactive dust that might have covered half the island. The leader was that guy I told you about, Al-Sistani. Professionally, I wish we could have captured him and seen if we could get him to talk. Personally, I’d pin the Congressional Medal of Honor on the cowboy,” Jaxon said.

  All told, twenty foreign terrorists, as well as two-dozen American recruits, had been killed. “The bodies of twice that many—what I can only call street people —”

  “—You might try patriots; they didn’t have to fight,” Karp interjected.

  “You’re right, patriots, though I’d like to know how they got there, but…,” he said when he got a sharp look from Karp, “…we stuck with our deal and didn’t go looking for anybody. Your boy’s ‘kingdom’…what was that guy’s name…Grale? Yeah, Grale…anyway, his little kingdom is off-limits as far as we’re concerned. I just hope you know what you’re doing there, the guy is bonkers. And the grapevine informs me that he still may be breathing—how they do it down there is beyond my comprehension.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Karp
said, “but not all that bad by New York standards.”

  Jaxon laughed, then pursed his lips. “I’d also like to ask you about the Asian guys with all the high-tech gear who fought with the…patriots,” he said, “but I’m guessing you won’t say much there.”

  “I didn’t know them,” he said truthfully. “But they did a good thing.”

  “And the Asian guy who was with Marlene but slipped away?”

  “What Asian guy?”

  “Thought you’d say that. What about the Indian and the cowboy?”

  “An old friend and Lucy’s…,” he hesitated, the word coming hard, “fiancé out here visiting for Christmas. They’ve all three gone back to New Mexico. Guess you could try to talk to them there.”

  “Already have; they aren’t saying much about the street people and Asian commandos, either.”

  “Vietnamese.”

  “What? Oh really? Anything else?”

  “Didn’t know them…except that they were Vietnamese and their bodies should be turned over to the Vietnamese community.”

  “I’ll see to it,” Jaxon said, standing up and shaking his hand. “Well, if you see any of these guys, tell them thanks. A lot of people owe them their lives and this country owes them a debt of gratitude.”

  “If I see them I’ll tell them that.”

  Walking toward the courtroom, Karp reflected that all in all the incident had turned out surprisingly well. As he’d told Marlene, he’d only waited a half hour before he called Jaxon and, after making him promise that he’d give his wife and the others another hour, filled him in.

  Jaxon had at first been angry for the delay. But when he listened to the plan, he’d conceded that “Ciampi’s Commandos,” as he called them, might have been right. He then summoned his SWAT team and picked up Karp on the way to the theater.

  The FBI agent tried to get him to wait in the command truck but Karp shook his head. “No way,” he said. “That’s my family in there. I’ll stay out of the way, but give me a gun; I’m going.”

  They reached Marlene and Tran, who’d taken up a defensive position behind a pile of rocks just as the terrorists were closing in. They’d run out of ammunition and drawn their knives for a last stand when the SWAT team arrived and routed them.

  “Well, if it ain’t John Wayne and the Seventh Cavalry.” Marlene grinned. “But come on, the job’s not finished. The rest of them are up the tunnel…” Marlene paused and listened to her headset. She took off running, waving the SWAT team to follow. “We have to move fast…the leader is retreating toward the bomb, he may blow it!”

  Meanwhile, after climbing out of the sewer drain, Jojola and Ned had found the going easy until they’d almost reached the tunnel entrance, where Ned had to shoot two guards. Jojola told them, “The guy was just finishing the fuse—little electric hookup—didn’t see me until I slit his throat. We were trying to figure out how to get to Zak with all those armed guys when Grale flies from the ceiling like some kind of vampire, then goes after them.”

  When it was over, Marlene rushed back to her dog. Gilgamesh turned out to be as tough as his namesake and survived, but not everyone was as fortunate. They’d attended the funeral for Rashad Salaam at the twins’ insistence. Afterward, Khalif had come over to shake his hand. “Rashad wasn’t bad,” he said. “He died saving me.”

  “So what are you going to do now?” Karp said.

  “Funny you should ask,” Khalif said. “My lawyer is filing papers on your ass—nothing personal—and I’ll use the money to go to college. Maybe someplace where I can walk on and play ball.”

  Marlene had been upset about the death of the street people and especially Tran’s men. “I know the older one had been with him since Vietnam,” she said. “And one was his cousin’s son, a doctor. They all died heroically.”

  Well, that’s one wild story that Stupenagel will never get…at least not from me, he thought. But he really did owe Stupenagel, and for more than just keeping her mouth shut, or at least keeping a story out of the newspapers—although that was partly due to the deal they’d struck that she’d get the whole Coney Island Four story first. When it was appropriate for him to talk about it, he’d give her the inside scoop.

  Sometimes you have to trade with the devil, he thought, to get a deal made in heaven. And this deal was working out to be just that.

  With the New Year, Bill Denton had been sworn in as the mayor of New York City. One of his first acts was to fire Corporation Counsel Sam Lindahl. Having served through a half-dozen administrations, Lindahl was completely caught off guard and hardly had time to stand up—much less remove anything from his office—when Clay Fulton walked in, told him the mayor wanted to see him, and then to come back to “remove personal effects only.”

  Denton had then named his own Corporation Counsel, a quiet but extremely competent civil attorney and Columbia law professor named Randall Canney. Then Canney’s first public act—in concert with the timing worked out with Karp—announced that the District Attorney of New York County had been appointed by the governor to defend the city from the “spurious” lawsuit filed by the Coney Island Four and their attorney.

  Hugh Louis had a nuclear meltdown on Brooklyn Insider with Natalie Fitz. He was so hot that the pint of pomade he’d combed into his hair for the show ran in greasy-looking rivulets down his neck as he mopped furiously at his face. “It’s all part of the white racist military-industrial complex’s conspiracy to undermine justice when it comes to the black man in this country,” he said. “They pull out the biggest white man they got to stomp on my clients yet again.”

  “And you, Jayshon, what do you think?” Fitz asked the young man at Louis’s side.

  That I’d like to stick it up your white ass, he thought. “Mr. Karp has characterized me and my friends as ‘vicious animals’ and ‘thugs’ in newspaper articles,” he said, placing a hand on his chest as if grievously wronged. “I’d just like to remind him that I was my class valedictorian that spring when I graduated from high school. I was also president of Young Businessmen of America–Brooklyn Chapter and the debate team. I planned to go to college to become a doctor so that I could return to my neighborhood and establish a clinic. But I guess Mr. Karp believes that all black people are animals and thugs. If that doesn’t say ‘racist,’ I’m not sure what does.” Word was that the television station had to cut to an unscheduled commercial break because Natalie Fitz was crying and couldn’t continue for several minutes.

  Louis had appeared at Karp’s office in a more conciliatory mood. “Listen, Mr. Lindahl and I had reached a settlement…pretty much everything except the signatures,” he said. “We were willing to accept a flat $100 million—”

  “No,” Karp said flatly.

  “However, considering things have changed, I believe my clients would consider $40 million—that’s only $10 million each—to have this little matter go away.”

  “No.”

  “Now, look here, Karp, you’re going to be running for office next year, and I don’t think you want the black and Hispanic communities pegging you for a racist—”

  “No. Not one red cent,” Karp said, trying to keep his voice level and to resist the urge to stand up and kick the shit out of Louis. “I’m busy. I think you can show yourself out.”

  “Enjoy the year, Karp,” Louis said as he stood up. “It’s the last one you’ll spend in the NY DAO.”

  Karp had then thrown another brick at Louis at a pretrial hearing a few days later when he didn’t ask for a continuance. “We’re happy with the current trial date, your honor,” he said to Klinger. “In fact, if you’d like to move it up that would be fine with us.”

  The tumblers were all falling into place. The day after Louis’s visit, Police Captain Tim Carney’s lawyer called and left a message with Mrs. Milquetost asking for a meeting. He had Newbury call with his response. “Come on down. We’ll listen to what he has to say.”

  “What about a deal?” the lawyer said. “What can I go back to him
with?”

  “Nothing,” Newbury shot back. “We’ll hear him out and decide where to go from there.”

  Carney showed up with his young lawyer, Christopher P. Ferguson III, a cheap ambulance chaser in a Sears coat, who immediately began making demands. “He gets complete immunity or we walk.”

  “Walk,” Karp said and pointed at the door. “You know the way.”

  The lawyer started to bluster, but Carney said, “Sit down, Chris, and shut up. They got us bent over a barrel.” He turned to Karp and Newbury. “Sorry, my wife’s sister’s kid, just out of law school. Okay, here’s the part you get for free; you don’t have to give me a deal to listen. But if you think it’s worth something to you and would like me to testify, then let’s talk. And I’ll throw in something you’ll like a whole lot on an unrelated but very big case.”

  Carney then laid out how Lindahl had been steering the big-enchilada cases alleging police malfeasance and corruption to a few big law firms for years—“mostly Louis, Zulu, and Radinskaya.”

  Newbury shrugged. “We already have that.”

  “Yeah, but do you have proof that Lindahl was taking kickbacks for his kindnesses, as well as when he signed off on the payments and forwarded the No Prosecution files to your office?”

  “We’re listening,” Karp said. He could almost feel the excitement boiling out of Newbury, though his old friend hadn’t moved or said a word. The smoking gun is a friggin’ cannon, he thought.

  Carney smiled and said, “Yeah, I bet you are. There’s more. Shakira Zulu was also paying some of her fellow city councilmen to sign off on the settlement payments, which, as you know, is required by law.”

  “So where do you and the esteemed union boss, Ewen, fit in?” Newbury asked.

  “I’d advise you not to answer that,” Ferguson said. “Not until we have a deal.”

  “Shut up, Christopher, you got a mouth on you like your mother,” Carney said. “Essentially, I was paid to look the other way and make sure that Internal Affairs didn’t poke our noses into certain cases and rubber-stamped whatever these law firms said. Some bad cops got off, the ‘victims’ got big settlements—part of which would also go to these firms that were supposed to be representing the cops. So they were double-dipping right there.”