Karp was still mulling over the telephone call when his next visitors arrived in his office. However, they didn’t enter through the usual means, past his receptionist, but walked in from the anteroom, where they’d just stepped off his private elevator from the Franklin Street entrance.
He pushed the button on the intercom. “Darla, please hold all my calls, and I’m not to be disturbed until I let you know.”
“Of course, Mr. Karp.”
Karp swiveled his chair toward the visitors and stood up to greet them. “Espey, good to see you,” he said, shaking his hand before turning to the other man to shake his. “And V.T., it’s been too long.”
“I concur,” Vinson Talcott Newbury replied. “I can’t wait to be finished with this and get back to prosecuting criminals instead of acting like one.”
“Me, too,” Karp agreed. “It’s tough to find experienced prosecutors who’ll work for peanuts.”
Newbury had laughed, his perfect white teeth contrasting with the perfect tennis-tanned face. Approximately the same age as Karp, V.T. had thinning blond hair, but he still looked like he belonged in a martini commercial—the extraordinarily handsome Anglo-Saxon man in the bow tie and tuxedo charming the beautiful woman in the low-cut black evening dress. He was the quintessential New England blueblood—sophisticated, cultured, educated, urbane, and wealthy.
The blue blood came from his mother’s side, but his father was no slouch, either. Vincent Newbury had been one of the partners in his family’s white-shoe law firm of Newbury, Newbury and White—one of the biggest and most prestigious in New York City.
At least until his own brother murdered him, Karp thought.
Dean Newbury thought he’d gotten away with killing his brother, who’d been a good, principled man whose father and whose brother never trusted him with the family’s darker secrets. And so far, Dean Newbury was right.
It was part of the reason that V.T. had concocted the scheme, with Karp’s reluctant agreement, of pretending that V.T., after a violent mugging—all for show but real enough to have landed him in the hospital—had decided to quit the thankless job of ADA and take up his place at the family firm. The hope was V.T. might uncover the evidence needed to prosecute Uncle Dean for his father’s murder, and also expose the family’s other business with the Sons of Man and their plan to create a fascist U.S. government.
“How’d you get away from Uncle Dean?” Karp had asked as the three men sat down.
“I needed to file some motions on a civil case,” V.T. replied. “But I have to be careful. If you remember, you and I supposedly don’t like each other anymore, so there’d be no reason for me to stop by and chitchat.”
They all knew that while Dean Newbury seemed to be opening up more to his nephew, he still had not brought him entirely into the fold. “I don’t know that he entirely trusts my about-face from dedicated public servant to power-mad Nazi,” V.T. joked. “He’ll talk about plans in a general sense, but no names or details. If I hint that I’m on board with his philosophy, he keeps reciting the Sons of Man mantra in Manx, ‘Myr shegin dy ve, bee eh,’ or in English, ‘What must be, will be,’ whatever that means in this context.”
“Well, be careful,” Karp said. “I wasn’t a big fan of this undercover-prosecutor operation in the first place. You’re making light of it, but your uncle and his pals play for keeps.”
“I’m taking it nice and easy,” V.T. assured him. “I say the right things, things that a new convert to the program might say, but I don’t ask questions or try to join anything. And if the old geezer doesn’t completely trust me yet, he does seem to be relaxing his guard around me.”
“V.T. has passed on several tips that have panned out,” Jaxon volunteered. “Including the names of some of the men he believes belong to the SOM council. A who’s who of U.S. politicians, businessmen, attorneys, judges, military officers and even movie stars. And recently a pretty significant piece of intelligence about Nadya Malovo.”
“Yeah? So,” Karp had responded, turning to Jaxon, “want to tell me about Dagestan?”
Jaxon and V.T. raised their eyebrows and looked at each other. “What makes you think I know anything about…what’d you say…Dagestan?” the agent asked.
Karp smiled. He and Jaxon went way back. The latter had once worked for the DAO until deciding he’d rather catch criminals than convict them. The former FBI special agent in charge of the New York district looked like a G-man with his pewter-gray crew cut, chiseled features, and steely gray eyes.
“Well, maybe it’s nothing, but I thought you might be interested in a conversation I just had with a mysterious youngster named Andy,” Karp replied. “He told me to ask Lucy about Dagestan.”
Jaxon and Newbury exchanged another look. “Tell me about this conversation,” Jaxon said.
After Karp recounted what he knew, Jaxon sat back in his seat and bit his lip before responding. “I’m not trying to be mysterious here, Butch,” he said. “I’d trust you with my life and you know it. But this stuff is classified—even V.T., who provided some of the information I’m about to discuss, doesn’t know what I did with that information. But more than that, the less you know about any of this, the better for all of us in case you ever get hauled in front of a congressional committee and told to spit it out. We’re all aware that the public’s right to know isn’t always behind these congressional subpoenas. The Sons of Man have influence in Congress. We believe there are members, or at least sympathizers in the House and Senate; it would be very much like them to use one of these hearings to put you under oath to try to find out what you know about their plans.”
“I understand,” Karp replied. “So just tell me what you think I ought to know. If that’s nothing, then that’s the way the cookie crumbles.”
“Well, this is one of those tips from V.T. that I was talking about,” Jaxon said, turning to Newbury. “Go ahead and tell Butch how this came about.”
V.T. shrugged. “It was just a case of good ol’ Uncle Dean getting a little forgetful. We were chatting in his office about some unrelated lawsuit when he got up to use the restroom. It gave me a chance to glance at some of the papers on his desk, and I noticed a sticky note with a few words and numbers written in pencil. ‘Malovo.’ ‘Makhachkala.’ And what I presumed to be a date. I knew that Nadya is public enemy number one and passed the info onto Espey. That’s about the extent of my involvement.”
V.T. turned back to Jaxon, who took up the story. “Makhachkala is the capital of Dagestan. So I contacted our friend, Ivgeny Karchovski,” the agent said, hesitating—he was one of a handful of people who knew Karp’s familial relationship with the Karchovski mob boss—“who as I suspected has great contacts in Dagestan—apparently quite the smuggler’s thoroughfare. His people were able to ascertain through their sources that there was going to be an important meeting in a little village in the mountains and that at least one of the participants would be the infamous Islamic terrorist Ajmaani, an alias for Nadya. We were able to get there first, take a look around, and set up a plan to—you didn’t hear this from me—eliminate Nadya Malovo.”
Karp noted the use of the word “eliminate” as a euphemism for assassinate. The fact that he would have welcomed the news of Malovo’s death made him wonder if, like so many others, he’d developed a moral immunity to certain types of homicides. That he was becoming comfortable with the idea of committing an evil to prevent an even greater evil. And isn’t that like believing that the ends justify the means? he wondered.
“Were you successful?”
Jaxon shook his head. “We thought we had her, but we missed. The woman has an uncanny ability to sense danger, as well as a great deal of luck.”
“Better to be lucky than good, I guess,” Newbury said.
“Perhaps,” Jaxon said, “but if you’re good enough, you don’t have to rely on luck. Eventually, luck runs out, but good is something you can work at, even improve. Unfortunately, Nadya is both lucky and good. But someday one or
the other won’t be enough.”
“What about this Andy?” Karp asked. “It would seem that you’re compromised.”
Jaxon rubbed his chin. “It definitely worries me. Outside of my people, all of whom I handpicked, you can count on two hands the number of people who are supposed to know about us and still have a few fingers left over.”
“So you have a traitor?” Newbury asked.
Jaxon’s face clouded over at the thought. “I don’t know…I wouldn’t have believed it…but somebody’s talking or found out some other way.”
“Ivgeny or his people?” Karp asked.
Jaxon gave him a funny look. “His people weren’t told Lucy’s real name, so it would have had to come directly from him. You believe he’d do that?”
Karp thought about his cousin. The man was a gangster, yet he had a code of honor as rigid as his own, and it wouldn’t have allowed for Lucy’s betrayal. “Nyet, as our friend would say,” he replied.
Jaxon nodded. “I wouldn’t, either.”
“And does this Andy or whoever controls him qualify as a traitor, per se?” Newbury asked. “I mean, he’s telling you—the district attorney of New York—that he’s aware of a federal antiterrorism agency’s actions in some far-flung country. Maybe he thinks he’s a whistle-blower, like the Iran-Contra thing a few years back.”
“We don’t know who else he’s telling,” Jaxon pointed out.
“I guess that’s true,” Newbury said. “So what’s with the word game? What does any of this have to do with the riddle?”
“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” Karp replied. “The phrase ‘In Casa Blanca plans are made that have to do with the art of war’ would seem to be suggesting the White House and plans for war. However, it says that one ‘can’ be a house, which indicates that it isn’t necessarily. So if the note meant Casablanca the movie, I wondered if maybe the German Nazis in the film were an oblique reference to the Sons of Man.”
“How does the art of war fit in either scenario?” Newbury asked.
Karp shrugged. “I don’t know. I know that’s a book, but I don’t know much about it.”
“The Art of War was written in the sixth century B.C. by the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu,” Jaxon said. “It has thirteen chapters, each devoted to one aspect of warfare. Even now it’s considered one of the most definitive works on military strategies and tactics ever written. But what it has to do in context with the rest of this, unless it’s just meant to sound threatening, perhaps a plot against the White House for the war, I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine.”
“‘But when you look at both what do you see?’ I take it he means when Butch looks at Casa Blanca and Art of War…the White House and a book?” V.T. asked.
“Or is there something significant about having to look at both of them in some sort of context together—that separately they don’t mean anything?” Karp pointed out.
“And last but not least, ‘And so does the deadly connection between the two sides,’” Jaxon said. “So when this deadly connection—which I’m taking to mean a person or maybe a group who operates between Islam and the West—looks at Casa Blanca and Art of War, they also will see what we would see? Which at the moment is nothing.”
“I don’t get it, either,” Karp said. “But Andy, whoever he is, does seem to be trying to warn me. He said it would be ‘the worst thing that could happen.’”
“And what would that be?” Jaxon asked.
“Wish I knew,” Karp replied. “There’s just something about the way he phrased the threat that bothers me…. I mean, what is the worst thing that could happen? Another terrorist attack with massive fatalities? The end of the world?”
“A death in the family?” Newbury ventured softly.
Karp grimaced. “On a personal level, that’s certainly the worst. And something I worry about every day, especially with Lucy, now that you’ve lured her over to the world of spooks and assassins.”
“Want me to fire her?” Jaxon replied.
“Yes…but no,” Karp said with a sigh. “I want her safe, but I guess the parents of every soldier serving in Iraq and Afghanistan would prefer their children to be safe, too. She wants to serve her country, and this is how she is choosing to do it. It’s not my call.”
The rest of the meeting was spent catching Karp up on a curious conversation that V.T. had with his uncle regarding Amir al-Sistani. “As you know, the family firm represented Prince Esra bin Afraan al-Saud when he came to the United States on business, and that al-Sistani was essentially his business manager. But al-Sistani was using the prince, and his billions, to try to crash the stock market.”
“And al-Sistani murdered him,” Karp added.
“Right.” Newbury nodded and continued. “And as we all know, al-Sistani was last seen being escorted into the deep, dark underworld by David Grale. Anyway, last week, dear old Uncle Dean came into my office and asked if I had any way of contacting Grale. He said, ‘I know there’s some connection between that madman and the DAO, and I just thought that perhaps you were aware of how to communicate with him.’ I said I didn’t know how to contact Grale, which was true, and Dean left. But I could tell he was disappointed. I asked him about it later, but he just said that people would pay dearly’ to have al-Sistani in their control. He didn’t say who or for what reason.”
“But apparently these unknown people are either worried about what al-Sistani might say, which I wouldn’t mind hearing myself,” Jaxon said, “or they want him for something else.”
“I understand he was pretty wealthy,” Karp suggested.
Jaxon nodded. “And that could be all there is to it: these people want to ransom him so that the eternally grateful al-Sistani rewards them with riches. We’ve tried to find and freeze any and all accounts linked to al-Sistani, though the Saudi government has not been very cooperative in identifying them or closing the accounts that the prince may have had that al-Sistani had access to. Even if they did, we probably haven’t located all of his funding and he may have quite a nest egg stashed away.”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming,” Karp said.
Jaxon laughed. “Yeah…but I don’t know what that ‘but’ is. I wish Grale would cooperate and hand over al-Sistani. For a while, we were receiving pretty decent information from Grale—a lot of it through your contacts, Butch…”
“Dirty Warren, the Walking Booger, and Edward Treacher,” Karp said. “Glad they were helpful.”
“Very helpful…at least for a while,” Jaxon replied. “But it’s been quite some time since we heard from them. I don’t suppose you’ve anything new to report?”
“I asked,” Karp said, shaking his head. “But all I get is that Grale is in one of his moods, and apparently isn’t talking to anybody.”
“I don’t get why he won’t give up al-Sistani,” Newbury said. “I thought we’re all on the same side.”
“Grale is on his own side,” Karp replied. “It so happens that our mutual aims have meshed over the past couple of years. But I think if he thought that God’s will was something that contradicted our efforts, he’d go with God.”
“Maybe he doesn’t trust us,” Jaxon suggested.
“Could be,” Karp agreed. “He’s indicated before that he thinks the DAO, as well as federal law enforcement agencies, have been infiltrated by evil demons. The only people I know that he seems to trust completely are Marlene, and particularly Lucy.”
“What about you?” Newbury asked.
“He knows that my office would prosecute him for homicide if he was caught,” Karp replied. “I’d have no choice, except that I’d probably have to ask the state attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to avoid any conflict of interest.”
“Lucy wanted to try to find him herself. In fact, I had to order her to avoid contact or she’d have gone underground to look,” Jaxon said. “We’d already sent a team in several weeks ago to look for Grale and al-Sistani. All they found were rats and a maze of tunnels
and sewers. But the squad leader told me that he and his men felt they were being watched the whole time. It gave him, and I quote, ‘the heebie-jeebies,’ and this guy is a former SEAL. No way I was letting Lucy go in, especially by herself like she wanted.”
“Well, thank God for that,” Karp said. “Even if no one else bothered her, I don’t like these reports about David Grale’s mental health these days. I believe he’s what we in the legal profession would call ‘a danger to himself and others.’”
12
“MOM…DAD…DO YOU HAVE A MINUTE?”
Sitting on the couch in the loft, Karp looked up from his book, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Marlene, who had been resting her head on his lap and purring as he absently used his free hand to massage her dark curls, lifted herself onto an elbow.
Something in their daughter’s voice elevated their parental alert system from yellow to orange. Even Gilgamesh, the big presa canario hound, lifted his mammoth head as his nose and nub of a tail twitched in anticipation.
Lucy had just walked into the living room with Ned from the bedroom/office down the hall. Both were blushing as they held hands, which seemed to be the only thing that kept the young cowboy from bolting out the door. Always shy, he looked nervous as hell compared to their daughter’s beaming countenance.
“Sure, sweetheart, all the time in the world if it’s for you,” Karp replied, though he was getting a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.
“Good because we have something to tell you,” Lucy began hesitantly.
“Oh God, you’re pregnant!” Marlene groaned, sitting upright and scanning her daughter as if looking for some telltale sign of impending motherhood that she had somehow missed an hour earlier at dinner. Gilgamesh barked and ran to the door, hoping that someone had invited him out for a walk.
Capture (Butch Karp Thrillers) Page 13
