Fatal Conceit (35 page)

“Come with us,” Lucy said. “I'll tell everyone what you did. You can make a new life.”

Malovo smiled. “For such a smart girl, you're really not very bright, are you,” she said. A wistful look crossed her face. “There will be no new life for me. And if ever we meet again, or I run across that bastard of a father of yours, do not expect me to be merciful. NOW RUN!”

Huff walked up to Lucy and put his arm around her shoulder. “Thank you,” he said to Malovo.

The beautiful assassin sneered. “Today I did not feel like killing you, but don't press your luck,” she said, then considered something. “But I'll be watching you. Do the right thing when you get back to the U.S. or someday you may wake up and find me standing in the shadows of your bedroom.”

With that Malovo turned and bolted for the back gate. At the same time, Lucy and Huff hobbled to the front of the mosque, where they were met at the door by Daudov and Jaxon. “We have to leave,” Lucy shouted. “A drone is coming to kill everyone here.”

“What about Malovo?” Jaxon yelled.

“No time to explain. RUN!”

The three men and Lucy ran from the mosque, yelling for the others to pile into a black SUV—apparently Al-Sistani's ride. With Jaxon behind the wheel, the vehicle spun its tires and raced for the front gate.

As he lay dying next to the wall where he'd taken refuge, Al-Sistani was the first to be aware of the Predator. He heard the buzzing of its small motors high up in the overcast sky. He lifted a finger and traced its circular path above.

Those in the SUV had only made it halfway up the hill when they heard the whoosh of the first Hellfire rocket. Then a second, third, and fourth. They stopped and looked back as the four explosions rocked the ground, and the mosque disappeared in a cloud of smoke, dust, and flame.

As the others were watching the destruction below, Lucy, who was
sitting in the front passenger seat, turned her head to look up the hill. She recognized the sound of the sniper's gun and now the only thing she wanted in the world was to see the man who carried it.

As if by magic, Ned Blanchett rose from the tall, golden grasses that had concealed him and began to walk toward the car. Lucy was out in an instant, willing her legs to move toward him. He began to run and reached her just as she collapsed, picking her up in his arms and looking lovingly down into her eyes.

Lucy reached up and touched his face. “Why, hello there, Ned,” she said. “What took you so long?”

W
AITING IN THE DARK, HIS
wife clutching his hand on the seat next to him as she stared out the window of the Bell helicopter, Karp was reminded of the afternoon in Central Park when he got the call from Jaxon—“I need to see you, and Marlene, right away.” How long had it been? Only a month? It seemed much longer and made worse by the lies, the cover-up, the murder of Sam Allen. The Al-Sistani video and the words “. . . the slaughter of these sheep . . .” had haunted his dreams.

With great effort he turned his mind from the image of his daughter with Raad's knife to her throat. Instead, he thought about the day Lucy was born and the mental images he had of her childhood. The precocious little girl who liked pink, dolls, and speaking Chinese and about fourteen other languages by the time she was in high school. He smiled. She had always marched to her own drummer, whether as a prepubescent polyglot or the deeply spiritual teenager who believed that she and her family were in the vanguard of some apocalyptic battle with evil, or the traumatized young woman who'd found love and security with a New Mexico ranch hand only to begin working with him for an antiterrorism agency.
All of it leading to this moment
.

Two hours earlier he'd received a similar telephone call from
Jaxon. “I need to see you and Marlene, right away,” his old friend had said again, only this time he added, “I think you've been looking forward to this moment for a while.”

They hardly had enough time to put on their coats and extract a promise from Zak and Giancarlo to “just this once, please don't do anything requiring an ambulance, fire truck, or the police” before Marlene looked up at the security monitor above the door and announced the arrival of a dark sedan. They hurried into the elevator and down to where a clean-cut, square-jawed young man greeted them politely but quickly ushered them into the car.

The sedan took them to the heliport on the east end of 34th Street at the East River's edge, where they were escorted to a black helicopter waiting in the shadows with its blades already turning. As soon as they were buckled in, the helicopter took off with a lurch and flew into the night to what the pilot informed them was Vermont. They landed next to a small, private runway, where the pilot shut the engine down and said they'd be waiting for about a half hour.

After some initial small talk with the pilot and each other, Marlene grew quiet, looking out her window lost in thought. Karp did the same, staring off at the surrounding black silhouettes of leafless trees against a sky filled with stars. It had been a week since they got the call that Lucy had been rescued and would be home soon, slightly more than that since the grand jury had returned a murder indictment against Rod Fauhomme and Tucker Lindsey.

At the thought of the two defendants, Karp felt anger boil up inside him in a bitter stew. He recalled how he had imagined going with Fulton to arrest Fauhomme and Lindsey in Washington and fantasized about their resisting arrest and the satisfaction he'd get helping “subdue” them.

Revenge was an unusually dark thought for a man who for decades had witnessed the aftermath of the horrific deeds humans do to other humans, the carnage created by depraved men and
women. Yet he had never given in to the natural desire for retribution and had insisted on the fair and just application of the law. Even when evil was visited upon his family in the past, he had compartmentalized the emotions of husband and father, putting them to the side so that he could do his job as the chief law enforcement officer of New York County. But vicious sociopaths and murderous terrorists had not evoked the loathing he felt for men in public office, and those who worked for them, who pretended to have the best interests of their countrymen at heart and yet were perfectly willing to sacrifice others like pawns on a chessboard if it suited their selfish purposes.

As anticipated, when news of the arrests got out he found himself caught in a Category Five media storm. The administration, flush with the election victory and aided by its flunkies in the press, had immediately gone into full attack mode. In the next day's news cycle he'd been roundly pilloried as a pawn of the opposition party, which, unable to “win the election fairly,” was resorting to “dirty tricks” to thwart the president's agenda “and the will of the American people.”

Released, despite Karp's protests, on personal recognizance by a judge known to be friendly toward the president's political party, Fauhomme stood on the steps of the Criminal Courts Building looking aggrieved and self-righteous while his attorney issued a statement. He'd labeled the charges “a partisan fantasy leveled by a politically ambitious district attorney. When the truth comes out regarding the death of General Allen, whom my client held in high esteem, Mr. Karp's incompetence and willful disregard for the truth will be self-evident.”

Lindsey sneaked out of the jail the back way and didn't make any public appearances. But he was later defended by the president's spokesperson, Rosemary Hilb. She expressed the president's “full faith and confidence that Mr. Fauhomme and Mr. Lindsey will be cleared of these unfounded allegations and the district attorney's ill-advised and misinformed attempts to link
the death of an American hero, General Sam Allen, to events in Chechnya will be shown to be false and politically motivated.”

The media happily went along with the official line, asking few pointed questions of the administration or the defendants' attorneys while making no pretense of objectivity in their news stories. As was his habit, Karp remained silent in the face of the increasingly vitriolic attacks, including editorials in New York newspapers that suggested it was time for “new blood and a fresh perspective” in the District Attorney's Office. Not that he wasn't angry. But it wasn't the press that made him mad; not even the reasons behind Allen's murder, though he was disgusted and saddened. His feelings were more personal than that.

“Easy there, big fella,” Marlene said softly, “you're going to crush my hand in that paw of yours.”

“Oh, sorry, sweetheart,” Karp replied with a smile, and released his grip.

Just then the runway lights snapped on and a few moments later, a small black jet landed and taxied over toward them. The aircraft had barely come to a stop in front of the helicopter before Marlene jumped down with a cry and ran across the tarmac. A door opened in the fuselage of the jet and a gangway was lowered; Lucy appeared at the top, saw her mother, and dashed down and into her arms.

Karp followed slowly to allow mother and daughter their moment. But then Lucy saw him and broke from Marlene to fold herself against his chest and the protection of his arms.

“Oh, Daddy, I am so happy to see you,” she murmured.

“The feeling is mutual, baby,” he replied, blinking back tears and then giving up and letting them roll down his cheeks.

Joined by Jaxon, Jojola, and Blanchett, the happy reunion continued on the helicopter's return flight, and, finally, in the loft where they talked into the wee hours. But they didn't discuss Chechnya or Dagestan. Instead, Karp waited for Lucy to come to him, which she did the next day at his office.

“So any idea where Nadya Malovo went?” he asked her after she finished her story.

Lucy shrugged. “I assume she caught that helicopter that Bula told her about; made up some story about him getting killed and a narrow escape. Whoever was pulling his strings in Russia was probably more than willing to make the trade for Nadya. But just in case she decided to do something else, Ivgeny stayed behind to work with Lom Daudov to try to find her.”

Quiet for a moment, Lucy then shook her head. “I don't know why she didn't kill me and Huff. I didn't think she had a drop of mercy or kindness in her blood.”

It was Karp's turn to shake his head. “I don't know either. She's a stone-cold killer and everything I know about her suggests that there's only one person she cares about and that's Nadya Malovo. But she didn't kill Moishe or Goldie when she had the chance and intended to in order to get at me; and now she let my daughter live. I hate to say it but I'm grateful. But David Grale said something to her before he let her go—not a threat so much, but that she might still be able to redeem her soul someday. Who knows, maybe his words got to her, but somehow I think we haven't seen the last of Nadya Malovo, and who knows how that will turn out when we do.”

Although Lucy tried to maintain her composure through most of the “debriefing,” several times she broke down and cried. “I'm so sorry, sweetheart,” he said, his heart aching as only a father's can when his little girl is hurting. It had happened far too often to this particular little girl, but he'd never gotten used to life's occasional harsh treatment of her. “It must have been horrible.”

“I had my moments,” Lucy replied. She wiped at her eyes, and then placed her hand on his arm. “It could have been worse, but I wasn't alone.” She then told him about St. Teresa's visitations.

As usual, he listened attentively but didn't know what to make of her experiences with the supernatural. When she first began talking about the saint as a child, they'd brought it up with psychologists,
who for the most part had written the events off as just a version of an “invisible friend. Completely normal, nothing to worry about.” As an adult, she'd claimed to have been warned or advised by the saint in times of extreme stress, and the therapists had attributed the “hallucinations” to her brain coping with the fear by providing a “protector.”

Since childhood Lucy had insisted that the apparition was real, and he had to admit that there were some pretty difficult events to explain away. Such as St. Teresa “telling” her that the “executioner,” Lom Daudov, was actually a friend and that she needed to do what he said. And who knew that Jojola would teach Daudov just enough Navajo, which he'd explained had two purposes: “So that only you and Lom would know what was being said and that whatever your physical or mental state—we didn't know what kind of shape you'd be in—you'd know that Daudov was a friend and that you needed to listen and obey immediately.”

Karp was not one to participate in religious rituals, but was deeply spiritual and knew there was a lot more between heaven and earth that he didn't know than that he did. If there was a St. Teresa, and she was watching out for his daughter, he was simply going to be grateful and leave it at that.

After several days in New York, Lucy and Ned left for New Mexico. Marlene had gone with them, as had a special guest, Jenna Blair. Putting nothing past those in power who might try to silence the young woman, he and Fulton had been pondering where to stash her until the trial. That's when Lucy suggested the ranch outside Taos. “It's quiet and everybody minds their own business,” she said.

When asked what she thought of the idea, Blair gratefully agreed. “I need some place to grieve where I'm not constantly in fear,” she said. “A ranch in the Rocky Mountains sounds perfect.”

A fan of cowboy movies and especially those starring John Wayne since his own childhood, Karp wished he could have spent a few months on a ranch as well. Instead, he had to deal with the
fallout of the indictment against Fauhomme and Lindsey while continuing to build his case against them, as well as run an office of 350 ADAs, a team of NYPD detectives assigned to his office, and a support staff of a couple of hundred.