Bad Faith

3

Lucy Karp noted the look of surprise on the terrorists’ faces after they burst into the pilothouse and the crew hardly reacted except to cast hard glances at them before going about their business. Only the captain said anything, which was, “Go to hell.” He muttered the sentiment with his back turned to them.

The crew members were not the only other people in the pilothouse. Besides Lucy, there were the two young men who’d been standing in line-agents for USNIDSA, the United States National Inter-Departmental Security Administration, which her agency had teamed with for this operation. They both had their guns trained on the intruders, identified at the morning’s briefing as Aman Ghilzai and Hasim Akhund.

“Drop your weapons!” the lead agent demanded as he sighted down the barrel of his gun at Ghilzai’s forehead.

“Girnaa aap ka bandooq!” Lucy said, repeating the command in Urdu.

Swift as a cobra the terrorist pointed his gun at Lucy and pulled the trigger. His face registered surprise again when there was an empty click but no loud report and no bullet left the barrel.

Ghilzai dropped the gun and reached for the cord hanging from the faux life preserver to detonate the C4 explosives packed inside and spew ball bearings and fire throughout the pilothouse. He braced himself for the expected flash that would carry him off to his reward, but his path to martyrdom took a detour when his weapon failed him again.

“Maghloob ho jana,” Lucy yelled. “Surrender!”

Ghilzai sneered at her. “I speak good English, randi.”

“Well then next time you call me a whore, I’m going to slap that ugly mustache off your ignorant face,” Lucy replied.

The agent next to her smiled. “Sorry about that, asshole,” he said scathingly to Ghilzai. “The bomb’s a fake and the guns are loaded with dummies. You and your pal are my prisoners.”

Ghilzai wasn’t just some poorly prepared, brainwashed recruit from New Jersey. As they’d been told at the briefing that morning after she and Ned left her parents’ loft, he had been trained at a top-notch al-Qaeda camp in Pakistan. “Remember, he is able and dedicated, and he will be determined to carry out his mission,” Jaxon had said. “When he realizes the mission has been compromised, he will adjust and try to kill as many Americans as he can. Precautions have been taken, but that doesn’t rule out some surprise. Be careful.”

Suddenly, the second terrorist screamed something incoherent, dropped his gun, and started to run from the room. But he only reached the doorway before he was knocked back onto the deck of the pilothouse, where he lay clutching his midsection and gasping for air. A bronze-skinned man wearing a ferry company uniform stepped in behind the downed man, followed by a tourism volunteer named Tran, according to his name tag.

Lucy tried to smile when she saw her fellow agents John Jojola and Tran Vinh Do enter the room, but it was a weak attempt. She’d known that the guns the terrorists were going to “find” in the life preservers wouldn’t be loaded. Still, it had been unnerving to have one pointed at her head and to hear the sound of the hammer striking the shell. She felt nauseous and dizzy, so she concentrated on the bantering between Jojola and Tran.

“Jojola! I thought we agreed that I would get first shot at these guys if they made a run for it,” Tran complained. “Tham lam lon!”

“He just called you a greedy pig,” Lucy said, relieved to have something to take her mind off the incident. A super-polyglot, she had a savant’s ear and tongue for languages, more than five dozen of them by last count. She’d learned Vietnamese, which Tran had used to insult Jojola, by age twelve.

“I understood him, Lucy,” Jojola replied dryly. “My Vietnamese may be rusty but I heard enough versions of that back in ’68 to last me a lifetime, so I knew what the ngu ngoc khi was saying.”

“What the hell?” said the lead NIDSA agent, pointing his gun at Ghilzai while his partner handcuffed Akhund, who was still trying to catch his breath from a blow to the solar plexus.

“He,” Lucy said, pointing to Jojola, “just called him”-she pointed at Tran-“a ‘stupid monkey.’ It’s a pretty typical insult in Vietnam.”

The lead agent’s jaw dropped and then he scowled. “I could give a rat’s ass what they’re calling each other.”

“This is what we get working with amateurs and old men,” added the second agent, placing flex cuffs on the downed terrorist’s wrists.

Jojola and Tran stopped their squabbling to look hard at the agent who’d insulted them.

“Amateurs and old men?” Jojola said, seething. “Look, you baby-faced James Bond wannabe. I was kicking the asses of tougher men than these two before you were born.”

“You mean we were kicking your ass,” Tran retorted before sneering at the agent and adding, “But yeah, tre em imbecile-”

“Sort of French-Vietnamese for ‘imbecile child’ …,” Lucy interpreted helpfully.

“-all I see are cheap suits, bad haircuts, and snot-nosed children playing at being men,” Tran continued.

“All right, boys,” Lucy interrupted. “I think we still have work to do, and we need to move on.”

She smiled and shook her head. She’d met Jojola, a member of the Taos Indian tribe, when he was the tribe’s chief of police and had teamed with her and her mother to catch a serial child-killer in New Mexico. A decorated army veteran who’d served during the Vietnam War, he was a spiritual man who had not been surprised that the crossing of their paths, and the seemingly coincidental events that had twisted their fates together, led to his joining Espey Jaxon’s small counterterrorism agency.

At least it was no stranger than the participation in the agency of Tran Vinh Do, a longtime family friend, mostly because of his dedication to Lucy’s mother, Marlene. Tran was a former Vietcong leader during the war in Vietnam and was now currently a gangster in New York City. Although she didn’t need convincing that there was more than coincidence to all of their lives crossing, it didn’t surprise her to learn that Jojola and Tran had been sworn enemies during the Vietnam conflict, even though they’d since buried all but the verbal hatchets and were the best of friends.

The federal agents glared at Jojola and Tran for a moment but then the lead agent shrugged. As he turned Ghilzai around, he looked at Akhund and said, “Good work, Hasim. We’ll put in a good word with the judge.”

Akhund furrowed his brow, trying to understand what the agent was saying, but Ghilzai got it right away and lunged at his partner. “Traitor!” he spat as the agent restrained him. “I knew you could not be trusted! As Allah is my witness, you will die for this and your soul be cast into the pits of jahannam!”

Hasim Akhund’s eyes grew wide with fear. “I did nothing,” he said. “They are trying to make me look like a traitor!”

“Okay, you two, break up the love fest,” the lead agent said. “Captain, would you make the announcement? Meantime, you two assholes stand there against the window. You might enjoy what you’re going to see.”

The ferry captain picked up the microphone to the public address system and spoke. “Ladies and gentlemen, please remain in your seats. Our sister ferry tied up next to us is ready to get back in service and so we’re going to let her go ahead. We hope you enjoyed your visit to the American Family Immigration History Center and we’ll be under way for Liberty Island shortly.”

With that, the captain turned off the microphone and nodded to the agents and Lucy. “Good luck,” he said.

“Thanks,” Lucy replied as she and her two cohorts quickly moved toward the door. She’d remained aboard the ferry when it docked so that she could listen in with eavesdropping equipment on any calls placed by Ghilzai’s cell phone. She knew the code words he was going to use if the attack was going forward, but if he had changed his mind and contacted his counterparts speaking in Urdu or Arabic, her talents might have been needed. They knew a lot of what was planned, especially regarding the attempt to hijack the ferry, but they did not know how to locate the other part of the terrorist team-only that they were going to attack by boat. Now she had to get to the other ferry.

Lucy ducked out of the pilothouse and hurried past curious, but not alarmed, tourists. She quickly made her way to the other ferry, stepping aboard as the crew cast off and the boat pulled away from the pier.