Capture (Butch Karp Thrillers) (12 page)

Karp had once asked him how he managed to get from the apartment near Washington Square in the Village, where Reed lived, to Centre Street without scuffing his always immaculate shoes. Stewbie smiled and allowed that he left a half dozen pairs of dress shoes in the office and wore running shoes to get back and forth.
“I have other dress shoes at home for going out.”

There was a knock at the door, which immediately opened to reveal Kenny Katz. The twenty-eight-year-old ADA was sort of the anti-Stewbie, at least in appearance. He was perpetually rumpled and Karp had once seen him use a Magic Marker to disguise a scuff mark on one of his shoes before going into court. A crooked grin, long sideburns, and curly brown hair that he wore in what Karp called a Jewfro made him look more like a left-wing college radical from the sixties than a prosecutor. But he was a classic case of looks being deceiving.

Katz walked with a slight limp he’d earned the hard way. Following the attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001, he’d quit law school at Columbia and enlisted in the army, serving with the elite Rangers in Afghanistan and Iraq, where he’d been awarded the Bronze and Silver stars for valor, as well as a Purple Heart. After his discharge, he’d returned to law school for the sole purpose, like Karp before him, of joining the New York DAO.

Karp chuckled to himself as Katz sauntered into the room, thinking that some people probably found his young protégé annoying, much like Professor Cole had said was the case with him. And yes, the kid—as Karp thought of Katz—could come off as cocky, but that belied a genuine steadiness and humility; he never boasted or
even talked about his military service or his medals, and it wouldn’t have surprised Karp if he was the only one in the DAO who knew about them.

“Ah, Mr. Katz,” Karp said, looking at his watch, “kind of you to join us.”

Katz blushed. “I was, uh, discussing certain legal strategies with Miss Bond.”

“Such as the best time for a rendezvous in the file room?” Guma inquired. “Been there, done that.”

Katz grinned and turned red. But it was Karp who spoke. “Uh, no need to reply to Mr. Guma’s ancient recollections of conquests real and imagined. His mind hasn’t been out of the gutter since puberty.”

Guma laughed. “I resemble that.”

“You don’t just resemble it, you’re the spitting image,” Karp shot back.

The banter went back and forth for a little longer, but then they stopped talking and all eyes turned to Karp. “Well, I asked everybody here to discuss what’s next with the Maplethorpe case, which is coming up at the end of the month, and get your thoughts together on…” He was going to say “what went wrong” but caught himself; this wasn’t about finding fault and he wanted Reed to know that. “On why you think the jury hung and what we can do to plug any holes, or anything we might have missed the first time.”

He sensed Reed tensing at the comment and hurried to add, “However, I want to start by saying, I’ve been over the transcripts—including most of the pretrial hearings—and Stewbie, no one can fault your handling of the case. No one knows for sure why this jury hung. It could have been as simple as one Broadway aficionado who slipped through the cracks at voir dire, maybe even lied for the purpose of getting on this jury to save Maplethorpe.”

Reed’s lips twitched into a brief smile and he nodded. “Thanks. But it still feels like someone tore my heart out. I keep going over the trial in my head, trying to figure out where I lost the jury.”

“Have you come up with anything?” McKean asked. “I’m with Butch here in that while we may need to alter our game plan a bit, I think you did a hell of a job.”

Reed shrugged. “Nothing I can put a finger on. I thought my expert witnesses were pretty damn good, but maybe theirs were just more believable. I’ve been over my summation a dozen times, and I think I could have been better there, too.”

“Maybe you’re overthinking this thing,” Guma suggested.

“What do you mean?” Reed asked. He smiled but his voice was defensive again.

“Just that maybe less would be more.”

“I thought preparation was supposed to be the hallmark of this office?” Reed’s jaw had tightened and his eyes glistened.

Guma looked up at the ceiling. “Look, Stewbie, I’m not trying to second-guess you…”

“Well, it certainly sounds like it…”

“I’m just trying to raise the possibility that maybe between all these experts, the jury got confused. And maybe this case was as simple as saying ‘This scumbag stuck a gun in that poor woman’s mouth and pulled the trigger.’ That’s all.”

“If it was that easy, you should have tried the case. I obviously fucked it up.”

Karp cleared his throat. This was not going the way he intended. He’d never heard Reed use the F-bomb and if he got his back too far up, he wasn’t going to be receptive to suggestions about how to proceed. “Okay, gentlemen, this isn’t getting us anywhere. I don’t disagree with Guma in some respects, but at the same time, Stewbie handled the case the way 99.9 percent of the prosecutors in this country, including those in this room, would have. But the old tried and true didn’t work this time around, so maybe it’s time for us to think a little bit outside the box.”

Guma and Reed had each started to say something but shut their mouths, and Karp used the moment to ask a question about one of the pretrial hearings. “I was reading the transcript from a motions hearing,” he said, “and at some point, Maplethorpe seemed to go ballistic, but the record stopped. What was that about?”

Reed relaxed and nodded. “It was the oddest thing. That was a hearing when they were still considering an insanity defense. Maplethorpe’s lead mouthpiece, Guy Leonard, was introducing some psychologist’s interview with Maplethorpe when he said
something about Maplethorpe’s mother. That she’d left him as a child, and Leonard wanted to introduce a photograph of Maplethorpe and his mother when he was maybe five or six. Suddenly, Maplethorpe jumped up out of his chair and started shouting,
‘Objection! Objection!’
”

“Which is when the judge struck it from the record,” Karp noted.

“Yeah, but the best was still to come,” Reed said with a laugh. “Maplethorpe was practically frothing at the mouth, and at his own lawyer no less. Leonard, who’d been standing near the witness stand, came over to calm him down, but Maplethorpe threw a pitcher of water at him.”

“You’re kidding me,” Guma said. “I would have loved to have seen that.”

“It was pretty amusing…Leonard’s there with this big water spot on his trousers—and that pitcher wasn’t light, it must have hurt. And the whole time, Maplethorpe is screaming,
‘You leave my mother out of this!’
They had to restrain him and take him out of the court.”

“You get a chance to explore that during the trial?” McKean asked.

Reed shook his head. “Unfortunately no. They didn’t end up going for an insanity defense, and they didn’t bring up any childhood issues, so there was no way to go there. I still have a copy of the photograph in the file, he’s all dressed up like a little cowboy…in fact, I’m working on something one of our witnesses—that Italian guy, Hilario Gianneschi—said that may actually be related.”

“How so?” Karp asked.

“I’d rather not say at the moment,” Reed replied. “It’s just a wild thought…something the guy told the cops about what Maplethorpe was wearing, but he said it in Italian. I told Leonard that I might want to enter the photograph as a prosecution exhibit, but not what for yet.”

“You speak
paisan
?” Guma asked.

“A beginner,” Reed said. “I’ve always wanted to visit Rome, so I’m going next summer with my sister and I’ve been taking lessons.”

Karp nodded. “Well, let me know if anything pans out. In the meantime, let’s all take one last look at the transcripts and meet again same time next week. When’s the next court date and what, if anything, is scheduled?”

“A hearing next week over more drummed-up nonsense. Otherwise, I’m just going over my opening and summation, and reviewing the witness testimony to see if I can spot any weaknesses with their experts or mine.”

“Okay,” Karp replied, looking at his watch. “Sorry, guys, I have another meeting. But I wanted to get to the final item and that is that I’m asking Kenny Katz to sit second chair with Stewbie on the retrial.”

Karp caught the quick, hard look Reed shot in Kenny’s direction. Katz also reacted by dropping his jaw; this was news to him, too.

“I don’t need any more help,” Reed replied. “Miss Brinkerhoff did fine.”

“I don’t think you do, either,” Karp replied evenly. Reed’s voice was getting angry, but he was not going to turn this into a confrontation if he could help it.

“Then I guess the purpose would be to have someone keep tabs on me—make sure I don’t fuck up again?” Reed asked. “Or maybe Kenny should do the summation.”

Katz squirmed uncomfortably in his seat at the sarcasm. No prosecutor worth his salt willingly gave up giving the closing summation in a murder trial. It would be like throwing a no-hitter through eight innings and having the manager yank you in the ninth because you walked someone.

“Not at all,” Karp replied. “As a matter of fact, I don’t expect him to do much more than sit there and observe a pro at work. It’s up to you to use him, or not, however you see fit. Do I think we can make improvements on how we go forward with this case? Yes. But my main reason is that this is an unusual case with a lot of nuances, and while you and I might not see another like it before we retire, he might and the experience would be invaluable.”

Karp was telling the truth. One of his “failings” as a district attorney, at least in his own opinion, was that he hadn’t done enough to bring along the next generation of assistant district attorneys.
The top echelon at the DAO, with guys like McKean, Guma, and Reed—
and don’t forget V.T.
—was one of the best in the country. But Garrahy had always emphasized what the longtime Yankee fan called “the farm system”—identifying the best prospects among the young assistant DAs and pairing them up with the best veterans. It was the reason that Karp had taken Katz under his wing.
But we need to do a lot more of that.

Reed didn’t respond to Karp’s explanation except with a curt nod. He didn’t speak for the rest of the meeting, and then left as quickly as he could get away. Katz followed on his heels.

Guma held his cigar up as if inspecting it for holes. “That went well,” he said.

“He’ll be okay,” McKean replied. “He’s taking everything a little personally. But he’s a pro and he’ll come around once he’s had a chance to chew on it.”

Karp nodded. “That’s why I didn’t want to announce that Kenny is second chair at the staff meeting. I don’t want to embarrass Stewbie. The rest of the staff can find out on their own the old-fashioned way…office gossip.”

Guma laughed. “Darla Milquetost, you mean.”

Karp chuckled as the others stood and left the office. The door had just shut on the last of them when Milquetost buzzed him. “You have a call…from Giancarlo.”

“Y
OU HAVE A CALL…FROM
G
IANCARLO.
” K
ARP WAS SURPRISED.
His family rarely called him at work. He looked at his watch, almost quitting time, and Marlene had warned him to be home promptly. Lucy and her boyfriend, Ned, had been in town for the past week, but Ned was leaving tonight and Marlene was whipping up one of her special spaghetti dinners. He picked up the telephone and pressed the Line button, expecting to be asked his ETA. “Yeah, G, what’s up?”

“Have you figured it out, Mr. Karp?” The voice was young, but it was not his son.

“Who is this?”

“Andy.”

“Andy who?”

“It doesn’t matter,” the boy replied. “Have you figured it out yet?”

“Figured what out?”

“‘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.’ It’s a riddle. I love riddles.”

Karp looked down at the folded envelope that was still lying on his desk. “What about it? You mean
Casablanca
the movie?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out. Can’t you see it?”

“Not yet, why don’t you give me another hint? Was that your dad who put the note in my pocket?”

The phone was silent and Karp thought he’d lost the connection. But then the boy sighed and said, “It’s the worst that could happen.”

“What is, Andy? Are you trying to tell me about someone getting hurt?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“Well, sorry, Andy, but I don’t have time for games…”

“This isn’t a game, Mr. Karp. Ask Lucy about Dagestan.”

“How do you know Lucy?”

“We’re old friends.”

“What about Dagestan?”

“Just ask. Then you’ll know I’m not just playing games. I got to go, see ya later, alligator.”

Karp hung up and then walked over to the couch where Murrow had been sitting and picked up the
Times
that was lying on one of the cushions. He was looking for a short article in the international news section that he’d glanced at before the meeting.

Here it is,
he thought, and reread the story citing a Russian news agency that blamed Islamic terrorists for the murder of a Saudi Arabian shipping executive in—drum roll, please—Dagestan. Apparently, Ali Ashoor, whose company operated refrigeration ships for transporting food and other items needing cold storage, had been in the country to negotiate a contract for shipping milk “when his party was ambushed while traveling through the Caucasus Mountains.” The Russian Army was said to be in pursuit of the Islamic “bandits and criminals responsible for his murder.”

The date of the incident coincided with a trip abroad Lucy had taken. In fact, she and Ned were visiting her family home on Crosby Street on their way back to New Mexico from wherever it was. She avoided talking about where they’d been and he and Marlene had known better than to press.

He’d had to admit to himself that there was a lot he didn’t know about his daughter’s involvement with Espey. Sometimes he and
Marlene didn’t hear from her for a week or more, but up to that point, they’d chosen to think it was because there was no telephone or cell phone service at the ranch cabin where she lived with Ned. Only when they drove into Taos could she call.

Still, it was hard to imagine his daughter connected to the assassination of a reputed businessman in a country he’d never heard of. But as he thought about what Andy had said, the picture was pretty clear. His daughter was a spook involved in a deadly, high-stakes game of kill or be killed with terrorists.

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.”