Capture (Butch Karp Thrillers) (10 page)

“Okay…anus sphincter…smart guy, who played Filby’s son, James?”

Karp rolled his eyes. “Boy, I hope you’ve got more game than this
the next time you bring it. The son, James Filby, was also played by Alan Young. And even though modern remakes are supposed to be off-limits for our little contest, you might be interested to know that Young also appeared in the 2002 version of
The Time Machine
. What was his role?”

Dirty Warren’s unshaved jaw dropped. He wasn’t used to fielding questions himself. “I don’t…shit vagina…know.”

“He’s the florist. Geez, I think you owe me a free newspaper or something.”

“Fuck you, Karp!”

“Warren, I thought you didn’t cuss.”

“Twat penis balls!” Dirty Warren yelled, and started hopping up and down on one foot, his face contorting under a tsunami of muscle spasms. Only with great effort did he calm himself. “Aw, I knew you’d get that one. I was just seeing if I could catch you…oh boy oh boy whoop whoop monkey asses…in a senior moment.”

“Senior!” Karp snorted, then grinned at the vendor, who grinned back.

“Yeah, old as the hills and…whoa lick my scrotum ass-banger…twice as dusty, as my dad used to say.”

“Well, if I’m going to be insulted, and you’ve got nothing better than softball trivia questions, I think I’ll leave,” Karp said with a wink, and turned to go. But prompted by the movie—with its underground-living, evil Morlocks—he was reminded to ask the vendor, “Any word from David?”

Dirty Warren scratched beneath the stocking cap. “Nothing…except that he’s in one of his moods.” The little man peered around the side of his newsstand as if watching for spies. “But I’ll tell you this. There’s been some other folks…fuck me naked…asking around about our dark friend. They’re offering big money for any information about him or that piece of terrorist shit…shit shit oh my God shit…he’s entertaining. And these folks with the money ain’t nice like you and me…asswipe motherfucking pig…not by a long shot.”

Karp scowled. “Do me a favor, if any of these folks come around again, give me a call,” he said. He reached into his coat pocket and
pulled out his wallet, which he opened to find a business card. “My office and cell are on this. I’ll trust you to be discreet.”

Dirty Warren gingerly took the card, as if he was being handed an ancient and fragile document. He tore the top half off that had Karp’s name, leaving just the phone numbers on the bottom. “There. Even if I’m cut into a million pieces and the bad guys…holy shit whooo boy…get this, they won’t know whose phone number is on it.”

“Good thinking, Warren. Give me a call if you see or hear anything to do with al-Sistani or David.”

Dirty Warren looked troubled. “Well, I’ll call if those folks come around again. But I don’t discuss David’s business…fuck your sister screw me…even with you. For starters, he’d probably slit me from appetite to asshole…asshole asshole…if I did.”

Karp nodded. “Wouldn’t want that to happen, but if you do speak to him, or can get word to him, ask David to contact me, please.”

The newspaper vendor gave a little salute. “Will do, Governor, though even you don’t want to…suck me dildo…see him when he’s in one of his moods. When he’s like that, he’s not the David Grale we all know and love.”

“I understand. Well, off to the salt mines,” Karp said.

“Yeah? Speaking of salt mines, what was the only movie ever blacklisted in America?”

“Another easy one, but a great trivia question and an important film.
Salt of the Earth,
blacklisted in 1954 at the height of the Red Scare.”

Dirty Warren clapped his hands. “Figured you’d know that one. It was based on a true story about a…screw my ass…strike at a zinc mine in New Mexico by Mexican-American workers trying to get the same wages as Anglo workers. Just making the movie…bitch bastard sack of shit…was enough to get the actors, director, and producers branded as communists; some of them were even deported and never allowed back into the United States. It was a big lie, of course—accuse all those people of being communists just to get out of paying them more. But people were afraid of communists, so the big lie worked, and the movie was banned for a long time.”

“I know it well, Warren,” Karp replied. “It became a famous First Amendment case and went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the movie guys won, but many years later, after it was too late.” He waved. “Got to run. It’s been fun.”

“Yeah…hemorrhoids hooker blow me…I’ll get you yet.”

As Karp turned back again to the looming gray mass of the Criminal Courts Building, he bumped into and nearly knocked over an old beggar. The man had been lurching along the sidewalk, hunched over in a ratty old sweatshirt with the hood pulled nearly down to his chin.

Karp reached out and caught the man before he fell, and for a brief moment caught a glimpse of his face. The man appeared to have some disfiguring disease that had destroyed the skin of much of his face, so that his two startling blue eyes stared out of a puckered mass of red and purple.

“Watch it,” the beggar snarled, yanking his arm out of Karp’s grasp and pulling the hood further down.

“Sorry,” Karp replied, but the man was already shuffling away from him.

Karp was nearly to the front door of the building when with a sinking feeling he realized what had just happened. The sudden bump, the tug on his coat—he knew without knowing that he’d just been pickpocketed.

He reached up to the inside of his coat pocket expecting to discover that his wallet was missing, but instead he found that something had been added. A plain white envelope, folded over. He tore off the end and removed the contents—a single note card on which written in pencil were these words: “In Casa Blanca plans are made that have to do with the art of war. One can be a house, the other is usually not an art. But when you look at both what do you see? And so does the deadly connection between the two sides.”

A riddle?
Karp walked back out toward the sidewalk and looked in the direction the beggar had gone, but the man was no longer in sight, swallowed up by the sea of pedestrians. He glanced over at the newsstand, where the vendor was trying to sell a tour guide to a couple of older tourists. “This here magazine is the best in the city for finding Dylan Thomas’s old hangouts…whoo boy whoo
boy poop nipples…including the White Horse Tavern…nice ass bitch…and the Chelsea Hotel. Hey, where you going? Don’t you…fuck me clit…want the magazine?…Shit!”

Karp shook his head and headed into the building.
Only Monday and it already feels like a long week.

A
S THE NONDESCRIPT SEDAN APPROACHED THE SMALL PORT-OF-ENTRY
post at the U.S.-Canadian border, its female passenger placed her gloved hand inside her purse and felt for the gun. A full moon glimmered off the first snow of the season, casting dark shadows beneath the forest of pines that lined either side of the two-lane road. The same incandescence illuminated the small border crossing post, but otherwise there were no lights on in the building or any other sign of human activity.

The lack of border security did not surprise Nadya Malovo, who released her grip on the weapon and relaxed back in her seat. She was well aware that while the United States and Canada shared more than five thousand miles of border—compared to the United States and Mexico, which shared nineteen hundred—there were fewer than a thousand U.S. Border Patrol agents in the north, while there were twelve thousand in the south.

There were also hundreds of small ports-of-entry along the U.S.-Canadian border used by the locals on a daily basis with little impediment to their travels. Malovo shook her head as she reflected that only six or so years after the attack on the World Trade Center, the U.S. Border Patrol still dedicated more of its resources to catch
ing illegal immigrants crossing the border to work than to preventing more terrorist attacks.

There wasn’t a terrorist in the world who didn’t know it was easier to slip across the northern border than the one in the south. Rural border checkpoints like the one they now glided past even posted their daytime hours and weren’t manned overnight. It didn’t take a lot of sleuthing, either, to discover such details thanks to congressional hearings about border security, which were duly reported by the press; all any terrorist had to do was search the Internet.

Waiting to cross into the United States several weeks after the attempted assassination in Dagestan, Malovo had read an article about how investigators working for the U.S. General Accounting Office had carried a duffel bag containing what would have appeared to be components for a nuclear bomb across the U.S.-Canadian border without being stopped or questioned. She’d filed that interesting possibility away for the future, while wondering how a nation as powerful as the United States could be stupid enough to advertise how to carry out successful attacks.

Nadya’s driver was a young white American convert to Islam who volunteered that he was the son of two wealthy corporate lawyers in Buffalo, New York. As he recounted in boring detail, he’d run away from home as a teen “with no purpose” until wandering into a downtown mosque where he’d been recruited by the imam. The man was a radical Wahabte who advocated the ultimate world domination by strict Islamic rule and had convinced him of the justice of Islam’s fight with evil America.

The young man had grown his beard, a patchy effort, as Allah commanded, and after months of listening to increasingly violent rhetoric from the imam, he had been filled with a desire to strike a blow against “the enemies of God.” It was somewhat disappointing that instead of some attack, his first mission was to escort a “very important person” through a border crossing he’d become familiar with as a boy traveling to Canada with his father to fish.
Perhaps after this I will be allowed to become a martyr
, he thought as he drove, and his mind turned to fantasies of dying in a blaze of glory.
Inshallah.

Of course Malovo could not have cared less about the young
man’s story or his religious zeal, which like any new convert he talked about incessantly. In fact, she wanted to tell him to shut up, but for now it suited her purposes to come off as a submissive and not overly bright female. She waited until they’d driven several miles beyond the border crossing, all without seeing another vehicle, and then turned to her companion and, as if embarrassed, said, “I need to…um, how do you say, piss? No?”

The young man glanced over at her and nodded. When he’d picked her up at a truck stop in Canada, he’d been dumbstruck by her looks and barely submerged sensuality, which was compounded by a sexy accent. He was troubled by his sinful thoughts, but not enough to stop him from checking out her breasts jiggling beneath her sweater whenever he thought she was looking out the window.

“Uh, that’s right,” he said. “But there won’t be a rest stop for another twenty miles.”

Malovo squirmed a little in her seat. “I am sorry, but I cannot wait so long,” she whimpered. “Perhaps there is a side road and I can”—she paused to giggle shyly—“piss in woods?”

The young man smiled. “There’s no one around. I can just pull over here.” He started to slow the car but Malovo touched his arm.

“No, please,” she said. “I don’t want to be by the road if border patrol comes. Is there no place where I cannot be seen from highway? You could be my guard.”

A fantasy of what might happen if he was standing next to the woman when she dropped her pants materialized in the young man’s mind. And as if reading his thoughts, Malovo gave him a tiny smile and added, “I don’t care if you want to watch. You are cute,
mal’chik
.”

The small logging road that appeared a quarter mile later couldn’t have come too soon for the young man, who swerved off the highway onto the snow-covered track. He was going to stop but Malovo urged him on a little farther “for privacy, please.”

At last she was satisfied and told him to pull over. She got out of the car and began to take down her pants, which her driver took as a signal to open his door and hop out of his seat. Not wanting to miss anything, he hurried around the back of the car. However, the
smile on his face disappeared as he found himself staring down the barrel of the pistol in the woman’s hand.

“What’s wrong?” he squeaked.

“Nothing,” Malovo said with a shrug. “It’s just the…what is the expression?…‘end of the road’ for you. But I give you chance…you may run if you want.”

Something in the woman’s eyes told the young man that there was no debating the issue. He turned and took off into the woods, slipping on the snow as he tried to gain traction. “No, please!” he screamed. “In the name of Allah the merciful!”

Malovo laughed at his frightened pleading; she preferred a chase when there was time for it. Trotting easily after the young man, she wanted him to feel fear as he dodged from one shadow beneath the trees to the next. When they were well into the woods, she lifted the gun and sighted along the barrel, waiting for him to appear again in the moonlight. When he did, she pulled the trigger. The bullet caught the young man in the small of the back, severing his spinal cord. His legs stopped working and he crumpled onto the snow, crying out in pain and terror.

Malovo walked up to her prey, amused by his attempts to crawl away from her. She stepped around in front of him so that he stopped and rolled over on his back.
Sort of like a puppy,
she thought. “You really are pathetic.”

“I helped you,” the young man cried. “In the name of Allah, why are you doing this?”

Malovo paused and tilted her head to the side, as if the question hadn’t occurred to her. Then she shrugged. “Because I enjoy it,” she replied, and shot him in the face.

The dying man gurgled as blood flowed into his throat. She was pleased to see in his eyes that he was still aware of what was happening. “
Do svidaniya, mal’chik
,” she said, and pulled the trigger one last time.

Finished, Malovo squatted to relieve herself, idly watching the young man’s fingers twitch as his brain sent out its last electrical signals. Then she stood and turned the body over and took her victim’s wallet from his pants pocket.
Twenty-six dollars?
she thought as she pocketed the money.
Hardly worth the effort.

However, robbery was not her motive. The fewer people who could identify her or help her enemies trace her movements, the better. With any luck, the body wouldn’t be discovered for months, if ever. But just in case, she wanted to make it more difficult to identify him and trace him back to the mosque in Buffalo. No one would miss the young man, probably not even his estranged parents. And the imam, an immigrant from Saudi Arabia, had been happy to provide a white American for the mission rather than one of his own.

Malovo walked back to the car and got into the driver’s seat. She drove forward until finding a wide spot in the road to turn around. Rolling past where her driver had stopped, she noted with satisfaction that only a few footprints in the snow could be seen from the road. Nothing to cause a passerby to become suspicious and follow them to her victim. A few minutes later, she was back on the highway, headed south for New York City.

Six hours later, with the sky turning gray with a hint of pink in the east, Malovo abandoned the car in the long-term parking lot at the airport in Newark. Because she’d worn driving gloves from the truck stop, she didn’t have to worry about wiping down the car’s interior for her fingerprints. And by the time the young man’s body and prints were matched to the car, she would be long gone from the United States.

Malovo caught the shuttle from the lot to the terminal and then stood at the curb until a taxi pulled up. The cabdriver was a “believer” from Somali who, if questioned, would say that he picked up a “man from Chicago” and dropped him off in Queens. The mileage would add up close enough to their destination in Brooklyn Heights.

As they’d passed over the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan, Malovo had looked south in the direction of Brighton Beach.
Ivgeny, my love, have you returned from your vacation in the Caucasus? When this is over, perhaps I will pay you a visit before I leave.

Immediately following the assassination attempt, she had jumped
to the conclusion that her former Russian employers had arranged it. Retribution for working “freelance” to the highest bidder. Or it could have been Dagestani, or even Chechen, nationalists who resented her part in turning their quest for independence into another battleground for Islamic extremists.

The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that her former lover was involved. Uninhibited by political interference from the outside, the Russians could have called in a massive strike from the military instead of a covert action. And the commando precision of the attempt seemed too professional for the nationalists, who would have come in with guns blazing or simply relied on the roadside bomb.

Yet Ivgeny was certainly capable of carrying out the attempt, especially if it was true that he was working with the Americans. Only a reflexive move, at the moment the bullet left the rifle, had saved her life. Otherwise, she would have been the corpse instead of the Saudi Arabian. And the secondary plan—the bomb hidden in the hay cart—had the old guerrilla fighter Ivgeny’s imprint all over it. If one didn’t work, another would.

However, again luck had been on her side. Fleeing the village, she’d passed the truck in front. She wasn’t thinking of the possibility of an attack from another direction, only escaping the village and the man on the hill who’d hunted her like a deer in the forest. She’d lived because she had uncharacteristically panicked and pushed ahead of the lead vehicle. But Ivgeny, or whichever of his men had detonated the bomb, thought she was still in the second truck and allowed her truck to pass, and thus she was beyond the blast.

Someday I will settle this between us,
she thought as she noted Governors Island in the distance.

A few minutes later, the taxi pulled up to a brownstone mansion on Pierrepont Place in Brooklyn Heights. Wearing a knit hat and sunglasses, Malovo stepped from the car, and though she was uneasy over being seen at that early hour, the only witnesses were a few solitary joggers out for a run on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.

Walking up to the gated door, Malovo noted the security cameras strategically placed so that no one could approach the front or sides of the house without being seen. She assumed that the back entrance was covered as well, and knew that the man who currently resided in the mansion would have an emergency exit should his enemies discover his lair.

Pressing the buzzer outside the gate, Malovo shuddered. She recognized that certain men were dangerous, like New York District Attorney Karp, who seemed to find a way to thwart her at every turn, and the madman David Grale. But she feared only two, Ivgeny Karchovski and the man she was about see.

He, too, had once been her lover—if that’s how one described such a relationship. Unlike with Ivgeny, where physical attraction and other emotions she preferred to deny combined so that she had enjoyed being in his arms, this other man’s attentions had been forced upon her by her former Russian bosses, who’d hoped her charms would give them leverage over him. But he’d used her like the cheapest Moscow whore. He did not make love, he raped.

Malovo let out a deep breath and collected herself. Theirs was now a strictly business relationship, and she would never have to allow his advances again. She still feared him—he was even more cold-blooded and cruel than she—but she knew better than to show it, as he would use it to his advantage.

“Yes?” replied a voice from the speaker next to the button.

“I’m here to see Mr. Erik,” she said.

“Your name?”

“Christine Day.”

“Your business?”

Malovo fought to keep the impatience out of her voice.
This silly password game is for amateurs. He already knows that it’s me.
But she answered dutifully. “I’m looking for the Angel of Music.”

There was a buzz and a click as the lock on the gate opened. She pulled the heavy steel gate aside and reached for the front doorknob just as another click indicated that it, too, was unlocked. She turned the knob and walked into the expansive foyer. A tall, muscular man stood up from a chair at the base of a circular stairway and walked toward her. His gun was holstered beneath his arm. She also
observed other men with automatic rifles watching her from other parts of the room and at the top of the staircase.

She noted that all the men were white and mostly cut from the same Anglo-Saxon or Germanic cloth.
He doesn’t trust the Muslims any more than I do,
she thought.
Just cannon fodder to help him accomplish his plans.