Escape (17 page)

The media storm broke with a vengeance. But between his attorney and the political spin machine the party ramped up, Charlie had weathered the worst of it. He was going to play the role of the victim. His wife was mentally ill, and she'd murdered their children. He was the romantically gallant public servant who was going to stand by her ... at least until after the trial.

The party, with generous donations from the Guppersteins, had located the most prominent experts on postpartum depression in the country and paid them to make themselves available to the press. The media cooperated by rolling out multiple-part series and television specials dedicated to "the tragically misunderstood and deadly postpartum depression syndrome."

Charlie had played his part beautifully. He'd tearfully discussed how he and his "college sweetheart" had been battling her depression ever since the birth of their first child. "She was on medication and we thought we had it under control," he repeated at least two dozen times the first week after the murders. "But the experts got it wrong. Now, my children are gone, presumably dead, and my poor, sick wife is being charged with murder." Afterward, his lawyer hinted that a lawsuit might be forthcoming against those unnamed "experts."

Charlie ended every interview by thanking "the many well-wishers who've expressed their support in this time of need. I just ask that everyone say their prayers for our three little angels, and save one for Jessica."

My wife the murdering bitch,
Charlie repeated to himself. He'd hoped that with Jessica in the looney bin and scheduled to go to trial, he'd get to spend time with Diane. But the lawyer and handler had nixed that. If the press caught on to his liaison, all the public sympathy they'd been nurturing would go down the toilet.

"Keep your cock in your pants a little while longer, Romeo," his attorney commiserated. "We'll get Jessica committed to a mental hospital and you into Congress. They won't be watching your every move in Washington, D.C., and then you can screw whoever you want. But in the meantime, if there's so much as a hint that you're fucking around while your children are dead and your crazy wife is on trial for her life, you might as well strap a bunch of dynamite around your dick and blow yourself up in a synagogue."

Charlie wondered why he didn't feel more grief at the death of his children. They'd been part of the big picture, but he'd had so little to do with their upbringing that it was like they'd been little strangers living in his house. He was sad that they were gone, but unless he was looking at a photograph, he had a hard time remembering their faces.

He looked over at Linda Lewis, who gave him the same look she'd given that curly-haired bastard with the DA's office. She was the wild card in all of this. His people had made overtures about him doing the grieving husband "should have seen the signs" thing. But so far she hadn't returned their phone calls.

The sooner Jessica was committed to a mental hospital, and he was in Congress, the sooner he could one day announce that it was with great regret that he had to divorce his wife so that they could both move on with their lives.

His reverie was interrupted when Judge Brooke Jackman entered the room and sat down behind a fold-up table.

Judge Jackman, a balding man who looked like he'd just eaten a sour pickle, lifted the first file on the table and glanced quickly through the pages. When he finished, he grunted once, then said, "In the matter of the State versus Jessica Campbell, I've read the reports of the state psychiatrists, who unanimously agree that the defendant is competent to stand trial." He looked at Lewis. "Do you have anything you'd like to present that contradicts that?"

Lewis rose quickly. "Yes, your honor," she said. "I'd like to call Dr. Niki Nickles."

Jackman scowled. It was going to be tough to get through the day's docket and still make it to the afternoon poker game in SoHo. "All right. Let's make it quick. Will the witness rise and be sworn in."

Nickles almost trotted to the witness chair. She was sworn in and turned quickly to Lewis as though to help the judge speed up the process.

"Dr. Nickles, have you seen the reports submitted to this court by the state's psychiatrists?" Lewis asked.

"Um ... yes, I have, um, yes."

"And do you concur with their conclusions that the defendant, Jessica Campbell, is competent to stand trial?"

"No, I do not... um, yes ... concur."

"Could you explain your reasons to the court, please?"

"Yes," Nickles said. "I have conducted ... um hmmm ... several hours' worth of interviews with Mrs.... hhhhmm aaah ... Campbell and conclude that she does not understand the nature and consequences of the charges against her."

"And what do you base that on?"

"She believes that... uh, um ... God told her to commit these acts and that ... um, yes ... therefore God will not let her be ... ummm ... punished."

"I see," Lewis said. "And doctor, the second question that we must address is: Do you believe she is capable of assisting with her defense?"

Nickles shook her head. "How could she? She ... um ... won't even divulge what she did with her children to her ... aaahhh ... attorney."

"That it?" the judge asked. "Jesus woman, it took you long enough to spit that out."

"Sorry your honor, she's got a speech impediment," Lewis pointed out.

"I figured that out on my own, counsel," Jackman growled. "But I get the idea. Mr. Assistant District Attorney, have you got anything to say?"

Katz rose, though more slowly. "No, your honor. We feel that the certified medical reports speak for themselves. I don't want to take up any more of your time."

The judge looked out from underneath his bushy eyebrows to see if the ADA was being a smart aleck. "All right then. I find the defendant competent to stand trial and order that a date be set.... Talk to my clerk about it. If there's nothing further, clear out."

S. P. Jaxon entered a courtyard leading to the entrance of the Al-Aqsa mosque in Harlem, his eyes rapidly flicking from place to place, face to face, constantly recording and assessing his surroundings. But he couldn't shake the feeling that something was out of place, or perhaps out of its place in time.

The building's entrance did not squarely face the street but instead was angled slightly off square, as if the builder had been dizzy. Having made himself a student of Islam for the past fifteen years, Jaxon knew that, as with mosques all over the world, the entrance and courtyard had been designed to face the Great Mosque in Mecca. Inside, the alter niche, or
mihrab,
was also aligned with Mecca, the holiest of cities in the Muslim world. In this particular case, the line ran from Manhattan at longitude 74°45' west and latitude 40°56' north to Mecca at longitude 39°49' east and latitude 21°27' north. It made for a peculiar angle in relation to the city's street grid.

Yet, it was more than the curious alignment that disturbed him. The simple, square building itself seemed out of place. Even something about the rounded dome and the towering minaret, from which he'd heard the
muezzin
call the faithful to prayers that morning as he waited to be admitted, made him uneasy. He'd always found Arabic to be a strange language, wild and harsh and unforgiving like the desert it sprang from.

Jaxon glanced up at the crescent moon symbols on top of the dome and minaret. The crescent moon was to Muslims what the cross was to Christians, or the Star of David to Jews. It was the symbol of Ramadan—Islam's holiest time of year when the words of Allah had been revealed to the Prophet Muhammad—which began in the ninth month with the first sighting of the young moon. He'd recently read a newspaper story saying that the Hayden Planetarium had already received hundreds of calls from worshipers asking what day they could first expect to see the symbol of their faith, though the event was still weeks away.

In any case, he observed, the mosque stood out like an igloo in this neighborhood, which consisted primarily of old red-brown brick and dingy gray cement tenements baking in the August heat. The walls that surrounded the property, as well as the mosque, minaret, and attendant buildings, were dazzlingly white.

Though simple in design, the complex had cost a lot of money to build, and the project had only become possible after a sudden turnabout in the mosque's fortunes. Up until 1998, the small group of Muslims who followed Imam Sharif Jabbar, mostly African Americans by birth and a few immigrants, had gathered for prayers at a former liquor store at 124th and Malcolm X Boulevard. After the liquor store was gutted by fire, the building had been converted into a prayer room. Then in 1999 there had been a sudden infusion of several million dollars from the governments of Saudi Arabia and Libya. The group used that money to purchase the new property, level the rat-infested tenement that stood on it, and build the mosque. They'd named it after the famous mosque in Jerusalem.

The generous funding from outside sources was not without precedent. Governments of Islamic countries, as well as their wealthy citizens, had been known to contribute large amounts to Muslim communities in the United States for such purposes before. This did not seem odd to Jaxon; after all, Christian groups in the United States often' built churches and proselytized in other countries. As one Saudi VIP had noted at the opening of the mosque in 2000, such efforts were necessary to meet the spiritual needs on an ever-increasing population of Muslims in the United States, most of whom were recent immigrants. Estimates of that population varied widely, Jaxon had found, depending on the sources he consulted, but the most reliable put the number at between 3 million and 6 million people.

Jaxon had no problem with the proliferation of mosques in America or the people they served. Like immigrant populations before them, whether Irish or Italian or Chinese, the vast majority of immigrants from Muslim countries were peaceful, law-abiding members of their communities. Like those other immigrants, they struggled to reach their American dream and meanwhile concentrated on learning English, working menial jobs, like driving taxis in New York City, or perhaps starting their own businesses, while sending their kids off to school so that they could be more than their parents.

Yet, based on what he had seen as a federal agent, Jaxon believed there was a dangerous element in the Muslim population that no other immigrant group had brought with them, at least not to the same degree or as a stated purpose. There had been anarchists and social revolutionaries from the start—individuals who disembarked from the boats at Ellis Island or came on planes or across the border intending to cause trouble. And certainly there had been a few Japanese and German sympathizers among those ethnic groups during World War II—though that was no justification for the internment camps of that era. But the revolutionaries, spies, and saboteurs had been rare and the danger they represented minimal.

This group of immigrants was different. For most immigrant populations, the ultimate goal had been to assimilate and eventually become American citizens. Barring those few agitators and spies, their first loyalty had been to their adoptive country, and they had come seeking freedom, grateful for the chance to live in a democracy. For many Muslims coming from the Middle East, especially those who were poorly educated and already indoctrinated by extremists in their native lands, their first loyalty was to religious leaders and Allah. And if they believed that extremist views, like those of Mullah Omar Rahman, represented Allah's will, and that Allah's will demanded the destruction of the United States and Western culture, then
Inshallah,
God's will be done.

Even in the mosques whose imams preached assimilation into the mainstream community and whose congregations publicly denounced the violence of Islamic extremists, there had been no great effort to cooperate with law-enforcement agencies in identifying possible terrorists in their midst. And the denunciations always seemed to come with some caveat that the United States was a target because of its support for Israel. Some of the 9/11 hijackers had worshiped at such mosques and even let their extremist views be known to various members of the congregation. But the excuse when those hijackers, or others suspected of plotting terrorist acts, were later identified or apprehended was that the congregation "did not know" that they would actually act on their beliefs.

Jaxon believed that a more accurate assessment was that Muslim immigrants did not want to know—caught as they were between wanting to be good citizens and a kind of romantic image of jihadis fighting for Muslims everywhere, even if they didn't agree with the tactics. He suspected that many of them felt that their non-Muslim neighbors, who weren't always welcoming or friendly, had some of it coming to them.

And then there were mosques like Al-Aqsa and imams like Jabbar, an American-born black who had changed his name from DeWayne Wallace. Jabbar had converted to Islam while serving time in Attica for murder and armed robbery. His sermons were often inflammatory—anti-Semitic, anti-United States, anti-white, and bordering on criminal incitement. However, with the help of good lawyers, he'd hidden behind his constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and decried how he was being persecuted.

When still "officially" with the FBI, and even while heading up counterterrorism efforts in New York City, Jaxon knew that many of the "guest speakers" invited to the mosque from Muslim countries were little more than bagmen for Islamic extremist movements. There was actually a circuit such speakers traveled around the country, and they went not only to mosques known to be fundamentalist but also to many of the so-called "moderate" mosques, raising money for various Islamic "charities." The funds actually went to support terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, but there was little law-enforcement agencies could do except try to follow the money through various channels and link it to outlawed organizations.

"My, aren't we on a soapbox this morning," Jaxon muttered, noting that the men gathered in the courtyard stopped talking and followed him with unfriendly eyes as he made his way to the entrance.

"What was that, Espey?"

Jaxon looked over at the young woman walking by his side who had spoken. "What? Oh, it wasn't important... Marie," he replied, placing special emphasis on the name. "I was just preaching to the choir."

Lucy Karp, otherwise known as Marie Smith, smiled. "I do a lot of that, too," she said in a hushed tone. "But aren't you worried that people will think you're crazy if you talk to yourself?"

"They'd be crazy not to," he replied with a grin.

Lucy laughed. Though she'd known "Uncle Espey" most of her life, he'd often been assigned to other parts of the country, so it was only recently that she had really gotten to know him. And
boy didn't that work out well,
she thought.

Late that past fall, he'd come to New Mexico, where she was living while working on the Taos Indian Pueblo reservation. He had needed help translating a taped conversation in an unknown language, and she'd correctly identified the language as Manx, the nearly extinct language of the Isle of Man. But it was not one of the dozens of languages she was familiar with, so she'd turned for help to a friend, Cian Magee, a master of Celtic languages, of which Manx was one.

A reclusive hermit who essentially lived his life in his below-street apartment/Celtic bookstore on the Lower East Side, Magee had interpreted the tape, which had included a coded message as well as what turned out to be the motto of a shadowy syndicate called the Sons of Man. Myr
shegin dy ve, bee eh.
What must be, will be.

Magee had then received a rare book, an apparently unauthorized history of the Sons of Man, which he told Lucy had been written sometime around 1930. The book described how the Sons of Man were descendants of smugglers who'd left the Isle of Man with their families near the end of the eighteenth century to escape the British Navy. According to the book, the original enterprise of smuggling—everything from guns to rum—which had continued in America, evolved into a sophisticated means of financing a powerful organization that had infiltrated all areas of American life.

Before Magee was able to say much about who the descendants of the families were—if he knew—both he and the book perished in a fire that started in his apartment. Who had sent him the book remained a mystery. But Lucy felt sure it contained a secret that was so important that the Sons of Man had been willing to commit murder to keep it hidden.

It was small consolation that Magee did not die in vain. His translation of the tape helped Lucy—aided by her boyfriend, Ned, as well as Jojola and Tran—to foil a plot by the Sons of Man to assassinate U.S. Senator Tom McCullum. A critic of the Patriot Act, which he believed overreached the intent of the original bill as a weapon in the War on Terrorism to become a tool for domestic spying, McCullum was also calling for congressional investigations into a series of attacks by Islamic terrorists acting in collusion with certain interests in the Russian government and mob—and, Jaxon now believed, the Sons of Man.

Magee's murder, as well as the sinister aims of the Sons of Man, had moved Lucy to volunteer, over her father's objections, to join Jaxon's team. Her first assignment was to serve as interpreter for Prince Esra bin Afraan Al-Saud, who preferred to speak French, though some of the members of his entourage spoke only Arabic. She would go by the name of Marie Smith for this job.

Marie Smith had been a real woman of about the same age who'd died some years before in a traffic accident in Ohio. Whoever did such macabre research had done a good job of finding someone believable. Marie had been a foreign languages student at Ohio State who was fluent in four languages. Lucy could handle seventeen times that many. She had spoken French like a native by the time she was six and Arabic by the time she was twelve.

Jaxon had told her that he didn't expect that her language talents would be necessary at the mosque immediately. The prince was in Washington, D.C., where he would be attending a state dinner at the White House and addressing Congress before arriving in New York. While in the capital, the prince's security would be the responsibility of the U.S. Secret Service; he'd requested that Jaxon take over once he got to Manhattan.

However, the prince had sent an advance team who might be at the mosque and need an Arabic interpreter. "And you never know when you might overhear an unguarded conversation of interest," Jaxon noted.

Jaxon had also told Lucy that he was counting on her adding to his knowledge of Muslim culture. As a student of languages, Lucy had always made it a point to learn what she could about the people who spoke them, as it gave her context to add meaning to the language. For instance, she told him, Esra bin Afraan Al-Saud meant Esra, son of Afraan of the Saud family. "The part at the end identifies which tribe they belong to, which is very important in Saudi Arabia," she noted.

Many of the two dozen or so men in the courtyard were dressed in traditional robes. Others wore everyday clothing indistinguishable from anyone on the other side of the white walls. They all had on the small, round
kufie
prayer caps, but there was nothing of particular note about that; even non-Muslim blacks in America had adopted the look as a fashion statement.

The few women present were dressed as they would have been in any conservative Muslim country. All of them wore traditional loose-fitting robes, and their heads were covered by the
hajib
scarf; several of them also wore the
niqab,
or face veil, as well.

The veil was often associated with
Salafism,
the puritanical version of Islam known for its extremist views. Its proponents claimed this was the "pure" Islam and made it their goal to remain undiluted by contact with other cultures and religions—especially modem and Western influences. Sometimes called Wahabism, especially in Saudi Arabia, it was the brand of Islam that promoted what other branches of the faith sometimes considered twisted interpretations of the Qur'an from which terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda had sprung.