Fatal Conceit (8 page)

“Oh, sorry, Warren, I wasn't watching where I was going,” Karp said to his friend, who owned the newsstand in front of the massive gray edifice, which housed the city lockup known as the Tombs, the grand jury rooms, clerical departments, the courts, the judges' chambers, Legal Aid Offices, and the offices of the district attorney of New York County.

“Well, that's . . . whoop whoop tits . . . obvious.” Dirty Warren laughed as he peered up at his much taller friend. Then he frowned. “Hey, Butch, you . . . whoop oh boy . . . okay?”

Karp looked into the magnified pale blue eyes of his worried companion.
No,
he thought,
I'm not. My baby girl and her fiancé are missing in action in a far-off country and there's nothing I can do about it.
But he said, “Yes, thanks for asking. You got the
Times
and the
Post
?”

“Of course,” Dirty Warren said. “When . . . fucking-A . . . don't I? Are you sure you're . . . whoop whoop . . . okay?”

“Yeah, just a little preoccupied.”

“Good, good. Whoooooop. Hey, try this one out. In
The Brothers Karamazov
what is the verdict at Dmitri's trial?”

Karp frowned. “Why'd you pick that movie?”

“Huh? I don't know, I rented it . . . scratch my balls bitch . . . the other night from that classic video store on Bowery. It's about . . .”

“I know what it's about,” Karp replied.

“Well, my my somebody . . . tits and ass . . . got up on the wrong side of the bed,” Dirty Warren said slowly. “You sure you're . . . whoop . . . okay?”

Karp patted his friend on the back. They'd been playing the movie trivia game ever since he'd met the little news vendor more than a decade earlier. He'd never lost a round either. But today he just had no heart for it. “Sorry, Warren, I've got a lot on my mind. Some other time, okay?”

“Yeah, sure. Here's your . . . bullshit whoop . . . papers. Nah, keep your money, least I can . . . asswipe oh boy ohhhh boy . . . do for a friend who's having a rough morning.”

“And you're a good friend, Warren,” Karp responded. “We'll catch up later. By the way, Dmitri was innocent, but the jury found him guilty.” He turned and walked away from the worried news vendor and headed for the main entrance of the courts building. He intended to go through a side entrance on Leonard Street where a private elevator reserved for himself and judges carried him up to his eighth-floor office. But he'd been so preoccupied with Lucy that, after inadvertently almost knocking Warren to the ground, he decided just to go in the front entrance at 100 Centre Street.

The building wasn't open to the public for business until 8:00 a.m., a half hour away, but a security guard let him in. He crossed the lobby and pressed the button for the elevator before glancing at the front page of the
New York Times
. Most of the articles were
related to the upcoming elections. The top story was about yet another gaffe the presidential challenger had made at a fundraiser. It was an ill-advised attempt at humor that had come off as insulting to women, and of course the
Times
—and, Karp suspected, the rest of the media would follow suit—had taken it out of context and blown it out of proportion to make it look as though the candidate had intended it in some callous way. The
Times
quoted the president's bombastic campaign manager, Rod Fauhomme, as saying the challenger was “out of touch and out of time” with voters.

As he read, Karp shook his head. He'd met the president's opponent and thought of him as a good family man and astute captain of industry, more interested in righting the ship of state with sound economic policy than in engaging in a war of empty words. He was overmatched when it came to rhetoric and disinclined to get into personal attacks, though he was consistently portrayed as “mean-spirited” and the pawn of corporations and Wall Street. Combine that with a cheerleading media that fawned all over the president without even the pretense of objectivity and it was a wonder that some pollsters still gave him a slugger's chance at a come-from-behind victory.

The president's poor showing at the first debate had been met with open dismay and alarm by a shocked media, which then rallied to make excuses for their man. Many insisted that he was tired from the “unfortunate necessity” of attending fundraisers in Hollywood but coincidentally engaged in the day-to-day necessities of his job, and truly surprised by the “lies and half-truths” of his opponent's debate points. The president had then come back in the second debate on foreign policy—a subject that the challenger admittedly had little experience in—by claiming to have almost singlehandedly destroyed Al Qaeda and the threat of Islamic extremists while negotiating for “a safer America than when I came into office four years ago.”

Easy, Butch,
Karp cautioned himself,
presidential politics will be what they are; you've got enough to deal with right here at home.
He looked for news about what the media now referred to
as the “Chechnya incident.” He found it relegated to the bottom of the page and there wasn't much. A brief recap of what was known: that about 3:00 p.m. EST, a U.S. State Department compound in a remote area of Chechnya had been overrun by unknown assailants, who, according to some sources “in the administration who requested anonymity because they aren't cleared to talk about the situation,” had been identified by Russian authorities as Chechen terrorists connected to “criminal elements.”

Karp's heart skipped a beat when he read “there are no known survivors,” but he forced himself to read on. The remainder of the short story reported that the president was going to address the nation that morning from the Rose Garden. Except for a brief statement Sunday that he was “monitoring the situation” and keeping up with “a fluid and evolving situation,” the administration had declined to comment to that point, “preferring to wait until the facts come in.”

“Good morning, Butch.”

Karp was surprised to hear the familiar voice behind him. He turned. “Good morning, Espy,” he replied, searching the agent's face for clues to whether he came bearing good tidings or bad. But there was nothing he could read in the blue-steel eyes or set jaw, so he asked, “Any news?”

Jaxon nodded toward the elevator door that had just opened. “Let's go talk in your office, if you don't mind.”

The men were alone on the ride up to the eighth floor, but they kept their conversation light except when Jaxon asked how Marlene was taking the situation. “Hard,” Karp replied. “She's taking it hard. I don't think she's slept much since Sunday and paces around a lot. You and I both know how tough she is, but yesterday I found her in Lucy's room sitting on the bed crying. I think the worst part is not being able to do anything about it; that's bad enough for me, but Marlene's first reaction to almost any stress is to take action. Not knowing and not being able to go rescue her baby girl has her on edge.”

Jaxon nodded. “Well, I may have some news that will help,” he said, but waited until they exited the elevator, walked down the hall, through his office's reception area, and into Karp's inner sanctum.

The office was a throwback to another time when Karp's mentor, the legendary DA Francis Garrahy, sat behind the immense mahogany desk that dominated the shadowed room with its dark wood paneling, leather-upholstered seats, and a wall filled from floor to ceiling by a bookshelf lined with law books and classics. Even the window coverings were heavy green drapes that Karp now pulled back to let in the morning light before he sat down at the desk as Jaxon settled into a chair across from him. Although Karp didn't himself partake, there was a faint odor of cigars and scotch lingering from days gone by.

“So what's this life ring you're tossing us?” Karp asked. He meant the question to sound more matter-of-fact than it came out, but Marlene wasn't the only one whose nerves were frayed.

Part of the difficulty was there was no one to talk to about their fears. They explained their melancholy to the boys as an old friend having passed away. And the only person Karp had told about the situation was Fulton. Marlene had called Karp's cousin, Ivgeny Karchovski, a former Russian army colonel and, more germane to the issue, the head of a criminal syndicate in Brooklyn's Little Odessa. She hoped that his connections in Russia might be able to find out more than they were getting through official channels. She said he'd gotten back to her but other than reports that his former employer, the Russian army, was cracking down hard in Chechnya, there wasn't much.
I would not want to be associated with the separatist movement in Chechnya right now,
Marlene quoted him. He also told her that it was possible that Al Qaeda in Chechnya was involved.

“I still don't have a lot,” Jaxon said. “Those NSA pencil-necks and the CIA goons are playing this close to the vest. It's ‘need to know' basis and because they weren't told about our mission—
and are scratching their heads over reports that there may have been another agency in the area—I don't have a way to ask a lot of questions. However, one thing that jumped out at me from the most recent report they cared to share was that the preliminary—and I emphasize
preliminary
—news from the Russians on scene is that there are no female victims among the dead. It's not much . . .”

“. . . but I'll take it,” Karp finished the sentence for him. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, there's one more item of note, though I hesitate to make too much out of it. If you add the people with the other team to ours, not counting Lucy, it would appear from the tally that several male bodies have not been recovered by the Russians either. Again, we need to view this with caution; there were apparently fires, explosions, and heavy weapons involved in the attack, and some bodies may not be . . . intact. But I guess what I'm saying is that there remains hope that Lucy survived and that there are male survivors, too.”

Karp closed his eyes and nodded. “Thanks for bringing me the news, and Marlene will be grateful, too. So if Lucy's alive, and possibly these men, they may be hostages?”

“It's a possibility,” Jaxon said. “In which case we can hope to negotiate their release.”

“I thought we didn't negotiate with terrorists?” Karp said. Again his voice sounded harder than he intended.

“Normally it is the policy of the United States not to negotiate hostages for prisoner exchanges or untenable demands,” Jaxon agreed. “However, that's not to say our government won't make concessions on ‘humanitarian grounds' with some backdoor bribes. And to be honest, there have been quiet prisoner exchanges handled through third parties in the past.”

Karp put his hands behind his neck and sat back as he regarded his old friend. “So you want to tell me what my daughter was doing in Chechnya?”

Jaxon held his gaze and then nodded. “I'm sure you understand that this is all highly classified,” he said, “but she was with a team trying to apprehend, or kill, Amir Al-Sistani.”

At the mention of the terrorist's name, Karp's eyes widened. Several years earlier, Al-Sistani had arrived in New York City ostensibly as the mild-mannered business manager of a Saudi prince who happened to own one of the largest hedge funds in the world. He knew his daughter had even met the man at a mosque in Harlem where she'd played the part of an interpreter for the prince's visit.

Outwardly meek and obsequious, Al-Sistani had worked his way into the prince's favor for the purpose of controlling the hedge fund in order to use it to destroy the U.S. economy. On the day that the prince rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange and began a tour of the facility, Al-Sistani set his plan into motion by first short-selling his employer's holdings, causing the market to tumble. He then attempted to blow up the computer system that protected the New York Stock Exchange from crashes. He also tried to destroy the computer's backup at a secure facility across the East River in Brooklyn.

The plan was a work of pure evil genius. If it had run its course, the market would have been unable to avoid the free fall and would collapse, which like a row of dominoes, would have then caused banks to fail, businesses to close, and rioting. Chaos and panic would have enveloped the United States and then the world as other markets and economies followed America over the precipice.

In the rubble of Western civilization, Al-Sistani apparently dreamed of a massive uprising in the Islamic world as secular governments were overthrown in favor of a one-world government run according to Islamic law. Armed with nuclear weapons from Pakistan and Iran, this unified Muslim world would step into the void to vanquish and subjugate the West. It would be the beginning of a modern Caliphate with Al-Sistani as the caliph. No small
dream, and the dominoes all had to fall just right, but he'd come within seconds of succeeding with at least the initial phase of his plan. But the disaster was averted thanks to the courage of some of the mosque's congregation, as well as well-timed intervention by others, including Karp, Marlene, Lucy, and Jaxon and his team, culminating in desperate gun battles in the bowels of the stock exchange and the building across the river.

After Al-Sistani's subsequent apprehension, Karp had planned to charge him with murder. However, he'd been persuaded by Jaxon to wait on the indictment so that the feds could swing a deal with Al-Sistani to learn who in the U.S. government, and particularly its law enforcement and intelligence agencies, might have assisted him in the attack on the stock exchange. It was believed that a powerful, secret cabal of politicians, businessmen, and military leaders had been working with him to further their own plans to seize control of the U.S. government in the pandemonium of an economic meltdown.