Capture (Butch Karp Thrillers)

by Tanenbaum, Robert K.

  The DAO required applicants to have three letters of recommendation, so Karp had asked Cole for such a letter and was glad he’d kept a copy of it. “So if you’re not going to let me read it, what’s it say?”

  “‘Mr. Karp is an able and intelligent man,” Marlene began lightly. “He is highly motivated toward law and public service, and well trained. He is competent and fully qualified for excellent service in any law office.’”

  “That’s what had you laughing like a lunatic? Have you been hitting the cooking sherry again?”

  Marlene stuck her tongue out at him. “I’m getting to it if you’ll allow me to continue. ‘He has had a remarkable career of extracurricular activities, which testify to his energy, well-roundedness and complexity of interests, a principled devotion to public service, and his ability to do a great deal of work successfully. In college he was a star varsity basketball player…’”

  Karp winced. His promising basketball career had ended with a blown-out knee that had required major reconstructive surgery and finished any thoughts he’d entertained of playing pro ball.

  “‘…and a major student leader on a campus of over 25,000 students.’”

  “I still don’t see what’s so humorous. If you ask me, it’s a rather dry recitation of these extraordinary facts as they pertained to me.” Karp grinned with a raised eyebrow and an “I gotcha” wink.

  Marlene rolled her eyes. “Yeah, Saint Butch. Anyway, what I was laughing about was what Cole wrote in the last paragraph. ‘He is a forthright, strong-willed, outspoken man, and his combination of aggressiveness and determination has no doubt made him controversial at times and has occasionally annoyed people.’”

  Karp’s wife, his darling companion, his one and only, burst out laughing and had to wipe the tears from her eyes before she could speak again. “Boy, this guy Cole was a master at the understatement. ‘Has occasionally annoyed people.’ Oh, that’s rich!”

  “Yeah, well speaking of annoying…is that it?”

  “No, he goes on, ‘Moreover, his manner is not entirely suave….’ He sure got you right, baby boy,” Marlene chortled.

  “Give me that,” Karp growled, snatching the document from her hands. He read silently for a moment before smiling and reading aloud: “‘Yet, I would consider these attributes as more desirable than not. They suggest a kind of earthy ability to understand ordinary people and a willingness to see even the unpopular jobs through to the end. I recommend him to you without hesitation.’ I suppose you were going to leave that out?”

  “I was getting to it,” Marlene replied, grabbing the letter back. “Give me that…I’m going to have it framed.”

  “Simple minds, simple pleasures,” he suggested.

  “Uh, I wouldn’t talk, big boy. If I remember correctly, simple pleasures were about all you had on that extraordinary mind of yours last night.”

  “I beg your pardon? I am a very emotionally complex man with a great variety of needs and am quite capable of multitasking.”

  “Don’t I know it, Romeo.”

  Karp grabbed for his Juliet, who deftly avoided his grasp. “What’s next week look like for you?” she asked. “The usual Monday morning meeting, I assume.”

  “Yeah, but I have two others before that,” he said.

  “Your mistress and who else?”

  “She couldn’t fit me in…so to speak,” he replied, which caused his wife to make a gagging sound. “So instead, I’m going by Moishe’s shop. The old geezers in the Breakfast Club are looking for a new place to meet now that the Kitchenette moved, so I was going to introduce them to Moishe and Il Buon Pane.”

  “I should have known. You’ve been mumbling about cherry cheese coffeecake in your sleep…. So what’s the other meeting?”

  Karp held up a hand. “Guilty as charged on the coffee cake.” Then he frowned and tapped the front page of the Times. “After that I’m sitting down with Tommy Mac to talk about where to go now with the Maplethorpe case.”

  Marlene nodded. Tommy “Mac” McKean was a longtime friend at the DAO who’d recently been made chief of the Homicide Bureau by her husband. “I still can’t believe the jury hung and that scumbag’s walking around town like he’s been vindicated. I read that ‘news story.’ It said he’s even going ahead with his new show, Putin: The Musical, if you can believe that. And how poor Maplethorpe has been persecuted because he was trying to help out some nutcase who offed herself in his living room…. You’re going to retry him, aren’t you?”

  “Without a doubt, kiddo,” Karp replied. “We’ll be asking Judge Rosenmayer to put us on the calendar for a new trial forthwith. But we’d better figure out where we went wrong, or the next time the jury just might acquit.”

  “How’s Stewbie taking it?”

  Karp thought about the question. Stewart “Stewbie” Reed was the assistant district attorney who had tried F. Lloyd Maplethorpe for the murder of Gail Perez. Stewbie was one of the most experienced and professional prosecutors in the Homicide Bureau. He’d won and lost cases before, but this one had been different—with all the publicity and scandal surrounding a famous Broadway producer, and up against a legendary defense attorney. There were a lot of pitfalls in such a case, and one of them was to get caught up in the hype and allow one’s ego to get involved. A hung jury could mean a loss in Reed’s confidence and the objectivity necessary to retry the case.

  “That’s one of the things I want to talk to Tommy Mac about,” he replied. “I haven’t said anything about it to Stewbie, except that no one was blaming him. But he’s probably taking it pretty hard. It’s been what…seven, eight months since Maplethorpe’s arrest? He put a lot of time and energy into the case.”

  “And if I know Stewbie, a lot of his soul, too,” Marlene added. She had once been the chief of the DAO Sex Crimes Bureau and had known Stewart Reed for many years, even working with him on several homicide cases that also involved sexual assaults. “He’s a good man, Butch.”

  Karp nodded. “Yeah, I know, and a great prosecutor. He probably just needs a pep talk, and an extra set of eyes to help him plug any holes. Then he’ll be good to go again.”

  “That’s my guy,” Marlene replied, and blew him a kiss as she turned to go back to the office. “So where are you off to now?”

  “Thought I’d catch the train to Central Park and watch the boys. Maybe treat them to a hot pastrami and corned beef at the Carnegie Deli on the way back.”

  “Sounds nice. Do try to avoid annoying anyone if you can help it.”

  Karp laughed. “If I don’t know that I’m doing it, how can I help it?”

  2

  THE LARGE GRAY RAT CREPT ALONG IN THE DARK, ITS NOSE twitching and whiskers spread like an antenna, alert for signs of danger. It padded around a puddle that oozed from the wall of a long since abandoned subway tunnel—sealed off from the main system decades earlier and forgotten—and stopped.

  Cautiously, it approached a man sitting on the ground with his back against a wall. The rat was hungry and hoping to steal in for a bite, if the opportunity presented itself. The man did not move, even when the rat scampered across his outstretched legs in an exploratory dash. It circled back and hesitated, listening to the man’s shallow breathing, sniffing suspiciously. Then it sprang forward, leaping onto the man’s chest and sinking its long yellow incisors into his cheek, ripping off a piece of flesh.

  The man woke at the sharp pain, and feeling the weight of the nearly two-pound rodent clinging to his chest, he screamed and shook his head violently. He tried to reach for his attacker but his hands were manacled and chained above his head. All he could do was screech and twist violently.

  Surprised by the reaction, the rat jumped back and prepared to flee. However, it quickly realized that it was in no danger from the man. It hissed and was preparing to leap at him again when it was blinded by a sudden bright light. Confused, the rat froze in place and never saw the stick that broke its neck and crushed its skull.

  “Oooh, lookie here
, Jeremy, a fat Gotham City rabbit for the pot tonight,” a short, dark shadow standing behind the flashlight beam chortled, holding the dead animal up by its tail in the light for his companion to see.

  “Right on, Paulito. Nothin’ like a bit of fresh meat,” his tall, skinny companion agreed, turning his own flashlight onto his friend, a dwarf with a bulbous nose and thick, stumpy arms and legs.

  “I ’spose that’s what our dinner was thinking when he jumped on our friend Amir, here,” the dwarf said, laughing.

  The two men turned their flashlights onto the prisoner, noting the small trickle of blood running down his cheek. The man turned his head from the painful stab of the lights and flinched as the dwarf moved toward him. But the little man brought a large set of keys from a pants pocket and used one to open the lock that bound the chains.

  “Come on, asshole, Father David wants to talk,” the dwarf growled, grabbing the man by his elbow.

  Amir al-Sistani groaned as he was helped to his feet. He then stood docilely as the two men fastened a rope around his neck and, giving it a light tug, led him into the darkness.

  After his capture in an underground tunnel as he left the New York Stock Exchange building, believing that his plot to destroy the American economy was well under way, al-Sistani thought of little other than how to escape these wretches and their insane leader, David Grale. He dreamed of making his way back to the world of sunlight. Back to where he was known to his devoted followers as “the Sheik,” and had hundreds of millions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts to buy every luxury, even as he plotted a radical Islamic takeover of the world with himself as the leader, the caliph.

  On the fourth day of his captivity, he’d even managed to break free from his guards, Jeremy and Paulito, as they were escorting him to Grale for another interrogation. He’d fled blindly down a tunnel in the pitch black with no idea if he was running toward sunlight or deeper into the bowels of the city above.

  Stopping at one point to catch his breath, he heard his captors laughing back in the direction he’d come from and calling for him to return. “Better come back before the others find you…or then you’ll be sorry.”

  However, he’d splashed on for a few more feet through foul-smelling water, recoiling as his hand reached for a wall to steady himself and came away dripping with slime. Forcing himself to move forward, he finally had to stop at what appeared to be an intersection of two tunnels. He was trying to decide which way to go when he heard strange voices screeching and gibbering from the tunnel on the left; they sounded some distance away, but close enough to send shivers down his spine. Realizing then the futility of his efforts, and frightened of these “others,” he stopped and waited for Jeremy and Paulito to catch him and bring him back to Grale.

  “Well, I hope you have that out of your system,” Grale had said with a chuckle, glancing at his grinning followers. “It can be quite dangerous to wander alone in my kingdom. You might lose your way and starve to death in some dark pit—or perhaps meet one of the former ‘pet’ alligators you may have heard have made their home here…and that’s no urban myth, I can assure you.” He laughed with his men, but his face had then turned grim as he added, “Or you might meet others who live here—not like my fine friends, but shayteen, to use the Muslim expression, demons who look like men. And let me warn you, they would not be too squeamish to see what a well-fed terrorist tastes like.”

  Grale lived with dozens of his followers in a surprisingly large cavern about the size of a university gymnasium. Within the cave’s confines and some other nearby tunnels and openings, the inhabitants had created small “apartments” carved into the walls or, like Grale’s, built from pieces of wood, bricks, and cinder blocks they’d gathered from the world above.

  Scavenging seemed to be the inhabitants’ main occupation as they came and went like ants foraging for the winter—leaving with nothing but the ragged clothes they wore but always returning with some useful item, whether it was a piece of food or of corrugated tin. al-Sistani had been surprised that these homeless beggars had electricity to dimly light and heat—via glowing space heaters—their filthy hole in the ground. Then it dawned on him that they must be tapping into the energy source for the subway trains that could be heard rumbling beyond the walls surrounding the underground encampment.

  Grale had pointed to Jeremy and Paulito. “These good men I’ve asked to watch over you are, in fact, your protectors as much as they are your guards. The others generally avoid the parts of my kingdom we patrol. But you never know when hunger will drive them to take chances, and with winter approaching they will be even more ravenous than usual.” al-Sistani realized then that he’d been allowed to escape as a lesson.

  Al-Sistani originally believed that Grale had to be some agent of the Great Satan in Washington, D.C., part of a secret U.S. antiterrorism agency that was holding him incommunicado to keep him out of the American court system, where he would have been afforded a lawyer and rights. When he learned that wasn’t the case, he’d offered Grale millions of dollars in gold for his freedom. But the lunatic just sneered at his offer. “What use will I have for gold in the Kingdom of God?”

  Only then did he realize that Grale was simply insane. A religious zealot who saw himself as a modern-day Crusader, battling the forces of evil—in his case, Islam—as he waited with his followers, who addressed him as “Father,” for the Apocalypse. So he’d pretended to be persuaded by Grale’s counterarguments. He claimed to have seen the error of his ways and wanted to convert to Grale’s version of Christianity—a sort of mystic Catholicism built around the concept that Armageddon was fast approaching.

  He felt no shame or sin in pretending to convert to Christianity. According to the imams in the radical madrasah of Saudi Arabia, strict fundamentalist schools, the Muslim concept of al-Taqiyya allowed believers to lie and deceive if it was for the good of Islam and the conquest of the non-Muslim world. In fact, the imams insisted that Allah blessed such deceptions.

  But Grale, whose glittering, intense eyes seemed to see into his mind, merely laughed. “I find your ‘conversion’ insincere and, therefore, as a servant of Christ, I reject it as false,” he’d said, smirking. “Consider yourself a condemned man for crimes—committed and intended—against humanity. Your life is forfeit, but should you wish to prolong it, you will tell me everything you know about the plans of your evil brethren.”

  At first, al-Sistani had refused to divulge anything. He’d expected to be tortured—as that’s what he would have done—but was surprised that Grale did not physically abuse him. However, the rats and the wet darkness—and the gibbering voices that sometimes seemed too close as he sat chained against a wall—eventually proved too much. He decided that Allah wanted him to stay alive with his mind intact. And that meant feeding Grale tidbits of information.

  Of course, he’d betrayed organizations and other terrorists with whom he had the least connection. The names and addresses of certain rogue members of the Irish Republican Army. Plans for suicide bombings in Muslim countries that he considered inconsequential to his grander plans to establish a Muslim caliphate.

  He’d been prepared to go on with further betrayals, but after the first hour, Grale’s eyes had clouded over and he’d gripped his head with both hands and moaned. “Get him out of here,” he’d screamed, waving a hand at al-Sistani.

  As he was hustled out of the cavern, al-Sistani wondered if he might outlast his captor. He’d seen Grale coughing up blood—probably tubercular, he thought—and the man had so little flesh between his skin and bones that he looked almost skeletal.

  After the interrupted session, a week had passed with no more contact with Grale. He’d asked Paulito why, but the dwarf just shrugged. “He’s in one of his moods. Believe me, you don’t want to talk to him when he’s like this. Not unless you want to feel his knife. When he’s like this, he hunts the others above and below the streets, including some of them you told him about.”

  Imagining the gaunt, spe
ctral figure rising from the shadows, his knife raised, al-Sistani had shuddered. Better them than me, however.

  Many days had passed since that conversation, or at least what he believed were many days—in the darkness it was impossible to tell exactly how long. Then the rat had attacked him and Jeremy and Paulito appeared to bring him back to Grale.

  As they entered the cavern, the people there stopped what they were doing to watch him walk past. Many were disfigured and cripples; they were missing teeth and sometimes arms or legs. Quite a number were obviously mad as they muttered to themselves, twitched, hopped about, and looked at him with confused, frightened, or angry eyes. Their unwashed bodies and foul breath made him nauseous.

  Most of them appeared to be men, though some were so disgustingly buried beneath stained rags and dirty faces it was impossible to determine their sex. However, there were some women, and even children and teenagers. In his eyes, they were a loathsome, scabrous people—the end product of decadent Western civilization and proof that all it needed was a push into oblivion from true believers such as himself.

  He thought of them as human garbage, unwanted even by their fellow Americans. But they seemed to see themselves as a community of equals; their pathetic shows of affection for one another, and the way those who appeared more or less mentally and physically competent took care of those who weren’t, disgusted him.

  Grale’s hovel was at a far end of the cavern in a cave dug into the wall at the back of some sort of raised cement platform that al-Sistani guessed had once been part of the subway system. Usually, the madman sat on the platform in front of his shack in an ancient, overstuffed leather chair, watching over his flock. He dressed in a cowled monk’s robe that shadowed his gaunt face so that the hollows beneath his dark and feverish eyes were accented against the nearly luminescent quality of his skin.

  As they approached, he saw that the madman held a chain leash attached to a leather collar that was fastened around the neck of a naked and prostrate man.