Bad Faith

5

Espey Jaxon looked up from the deck of the ferry, saw the news helicopter circling in the distance, and then noticed Nadya Malovo out of the corner of his eye. She’d come out from the interior of the boat with Agent Mike Rolles, her National Inter-Departmental Security Administration handler, and walked over to stand beside him. She looked across the water at the motorboat filled with armed men that stood motionless in the water.

“I thought the idea was to keep her out of sight,” Jaxon said to Agent Rolles with a frown.

Before the agent could answer, U.S. Marshal Jen Capers emerged from the ferry and strode up to where the three stood. “It was,” she answered angrily. She pointed her finger at the agent and said, “This violates the agreement.”

“Relax,” Rolles said with a smirk. He reminded Jaxon of a college fraternity type playing at secret agent. “What’s she going to do, swim for it? She’s cuffed, and she’s with me. She just wanted to watch, and after all, she’s the reason Ali Baba and the Forty Terrorists on that boat over there are screwed. Or would you have rather watched this ferry and a few hundred tourists get incinerated on the news tonight?”

“She couldn’t care less about innocent people dying,” Capers spat, fixing Malovo with a hard stare. “She’s looking out for herself. Now she goes inside, or I’ll haul her sociopathic rear end back to that nice little cell we have for her at FloMax penitentiary. She’s still a prisoner of the U.S. Marshals Service.”

“Afraid national security trumps your little escort service,” the agent said scathingly.

“Yeah?” Capers replied, pulling out her cell phone and holding it up to him. “You want to explain to your boss and mine what your playing Pinocchio to her Geppetto has to do with national security? Maybe she’s yanking your strings, or something else, a bit too much and you need to be cut loose. Now, what’s it going to be? You want to make the call or should I?”

Rolles’s smirk dissolved into an angry glare and his face flushed. But then he turned to Malovo and nodded toward the door. “Go inside,” he snapped.

“Yes, of course,” Malovo replied in heavily accented English. She looked up at the news helicopter hovering in the distance and smiled at Capers. “I’ll leave you with your boyfriend and watch the festivities with someone who appreciates my … contributions. Such fire in a woman … a shame you only like men.”

Capers ignored the comment and signaled to a young marshal standing close to the ferry door. “Hank, escort the prisoner back inside,” she said, “and this time if she moves from where I told her to stay, cuff her to the rail.”

Hank Masterson, a former Navy SEAL and prior to that a college linebacker, nodded. “Yes, ma’am. And if Double-oh-seven has a problem with it, should I cuff him, too?”

Rolles bristled. “You want to go, big boy, let me know,” he shot back, but turned away when Masterson just laughed at him.

When the others were inside, Capers looked at Jaxon. “Sorry about that,” she said. “I had to call in to headquarters and couldn’t get any reception inside the ferry. Hank was supposed to stay with her but Rolles convinced him to wait for me. Good man, Hank, but he’s still learning.”

“Not a problem,” Jaxon replied as he smiled and then turned back to study the idling motorboat through his binoculars. “And it was worth listening to you cut that jackass down to size with the Pinocchio comment-‘yanking your strings, or something else,’ that’s classic. Still, I have to admit, I’m glad she tipped us off on this one.”

Capers didn’t respond to his last comment and he knew why. A year ago, Malovo had posed as the legal assistant of a lawyer who was helping defend a terrorist, the imam Jabbar, in a trial Karp was prosecuting. She poisoned a former leader of the Sons of Man as he was about to testify about his secret society’s role in aiding the defendant in an attack on the New York Stock Exchange. Malovo had then escaped from the courtroom and made her way to Il Buon Pane bakery, where she intended to murder the owner, Moishe Sobelman, just to torment her nemesis Butch Karp, who had befriended the old man. But Moishe’s wife, Goldie, had somehow made her hesitate, and then Capers arrived at the shop and got the drop on her.

It had taken every ounce of her professionalism for Capers not to pull the trigger and arrest her instead. Just a few months earlier, Malovo had led an attack that killed Capers’s partner. It rankled Capers that she now had to play babysitter for Malovo, who’d worked out some sort of deal with the NIDSA higher-ups in which she supplied information on radical Islamic sleeper cells.

“The powers that be decided we don’t need to know all of what she’s getting in exchange,” Capers told Jaxon one evening when they were discussing the arrangement over dinner. “We just know she’ll be going into WITSEC; but what else she gets, your guess is as good as mine, and for some reason it’s a big secret.”

Jaxon now grimaced remembering the conversation and Capers’s distress that instead of languishing in a tiny isolation cell with a shoebox-sized window for light twenty-three hours a day-or receiving the death penalty-her enemy would be placed in WITSEC, the federal witness protection program. There Malovo would, at the very least, be given a new identity, a place to live, and money to live on, and, most galling of all, the U.S. Marshals Service would be responsible for her safety.

“I’m sorry, querida,” he said now, using his pet name for her as no one was close enough to hear. “It’s just wrong. No matter what she gives us now, it doesn’t absolve her of the evil she’s done.”

Capers patted him lightly on the shoulder. “Don’t sweat it, pumpkin,” she replied. “My partner would have gladly given his life to save innocent people, even if it required our making a deal with the devil.”

“A she-devil,” Jaxon said, turning from the rail to face her.

“Yeah, and I’m worried about what she’s really got planned in that twisted mind,” Capers replied. “I have a hard time envisioning her settling down in some small obscure town in the Midwest and joining the local Junior League, all under the watchful eye of my office. That’s a leap too far if you get my drift.”

“I do,” Jaxon said. “But I feel safer knowing that you’re itching to put a bullet in her if she so much as blinks in the wrong direction.”

Capers nodded. “I wouldn’t mind.”

Jaxon smiled. “I rather enjoyed playing the old married couple in line this morning,” he said.

Capers returned the smile. “Yeah, something I could get used to,” she said, and then sighed. “Of course, a girl would have to be asked first.”

When she saw his expression change, she laughed again and said with a light drawl she’d picked up in her hometown of Austin, Texas, “Why bless your heart, Agent Espey Jaxon, you’re as red as a chili pepper. I do believe you’re feeling a tad backed into a corner?”

“No, I … um … well,” Jaxon stammered. “I just wasn’t expecting-”

Capers laughed again. “Don’t worry. You’re off the hook … for now. I’ll let you go back to capturing terrorists while I check on my prisoner and hope she tries to escape.”

“We still on for dinner at Butch and Marlene’s place tomorrow night?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for all the oil in Texas,” Capers replied.

As she disappeared back inside the ferry, Jaxon glanced over at where Ned Blanchett lay prone on the deck, looking through the scope of his sniper rifle at the terrorists on the other boat. A few feet beyond him, Lucy Karp and several NIDSA agents hovered around communication equipment set up for negotiating with the terrorists on the boat.

Lucy looked up as he approached and shook her head. Jaxon looked at his watch: 8:50. The terrorists had until nine to surrender or face attack.

He had insisted that his agency be in charge of this operation while the NIDSA agents took a backseat. Jaxon’s argument was that Malovo was vital to his agency’s attempts to root out the remaining members of the Sons of Man and should stay his prisoner. Under normal circumstances, a bigger national security group like NIDSA would have laughed and taken over. But the powerful man who had formed Jaxon’s agency in secrecy and asked him to run it carried a lot of weight in the nation’s capital, and his team leader got what he wanted in this case.

After complaining vigorously, the chief agent for NIDSA gave in but insisted that his man be the liaison between Malovo and Jaxon’s agency. He had no choice but to agree; the assassin would only talk to the agent. Other agents with several agencies had tried to interrogate her after her arrest, but it wasn’t until the current macho man came along that she agreed to make a deal. Exactly what it was wasn’t clear, but it started with her not spending the rest of her life in FloMax, the maximum-security federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, that housed the worst of the worst, including the Blind Sheik and the Unabomber.

So Jaxon had to rely on the agent to pass on any information that was pertinent to the Sons of Man. Occasionally, Jaxon was allowed to question Malovo in the presence of the NIDSA agent about information she had provided. But most of what he learned was relayed in briefings.

Currently, she wasn’t divulging much about the Sons of Man. She’d diverted the focus to a series of terrorist plots aimed at the New York metropolitan area that she said her sources had told her were in the works. The sources believed that she was her alter ego, Ajmaani, a Chechen Muslim terrorist, and she’d used that to infiltrate the sleeper cells to find out their plans.

It was how they’d learned about the impending attack on the ferry. She said she’d been told that two men would board the ferry and wait until the boat was leaving Ellis Island before signaling to their comrades waiting in another boat and then commandeering the lightly guarded vessel using weapons they believed had been stashed aboard by an accomplice. Once the boat was in their control, they would order it stopped in the waters just off Liberty Island. They would then blow it up with everyone on it, including themselves and every man, woman, and child.

“For propaganda purposes,” Malovo had explained.

Thanks to Malovo’s information, they’d been able to identify Ghilzai and Akhund; knew where the accomplice (who’d since been arrested) had hidden the weapons, which had been exchanged for harmless fakes; and were waiting for Ghilzai to pass the word to proceed to the others when the ferry started to leave the dock.

Originally, they had considered remaining on the regular ferry and continuing with the journey, inviting attack even with the tourists aboard, so that the waiting terrorists would not note anything amiss. But there was too much of a risk that the attackers might get through the first line of defense and hurt or kill an innocent adult or child. So they’d come up with the idea of switching ferries, bringing the second ferry with the armed agents over in the middle of the night.

Malovo knew that the main terrorist group would be approaching the ferry from the water, but she said she wasn’t sure of the boat they would be using as they planned to steal one in the night. And that was a source of concern. On any given day in the spring, New York Harbor was jumping with watercraft, from oceangoing freighters and Hudson River barges to cabin cruisers, yachts, and small sailboats. The feds would have to let some of them approach close enough to be sure they were the enemy or risk tipping the terrorists off and allowing them to escape to plan some other attack.

It was the reason Malovo had been brought along for the ride. She would make her appearance from the pilothouse and then go back inside once the attackers had revealed themselves. And indeed that’s what happened.

When they reached the waters off Liberty Island in front of the statue, Malovo walked out of the pilothouse and the captain shut his engines down as if he was following the instructions of Ghilzai. That’s when a large cabin cruiser that had been in with the other boat traffic suddenly veered toward them.

Jaxon had waited for the terrorists’ boat to separate from the vessels around them and move to within a few hundred yards, then gave the word. Suddenly, a half-dozen New York Police Department speedboats and a U.S. Coast Guard gunboat with a fifty-caliber machine gun mounted on the bow materialized seemingly out of nowhere. The gunboat swerved into the path of the cabin cruiser; the terrorists tried to escape, but they were cut off by the NYPD craft surrounding them. At the same time, two dozen federal agents from Jaxon’s office and NIDSA transformed from supposed tourists milling about on deck to armed men ready to repel boarders. They were then joined by an NYPD helicopter with a sharpshooter perched in the open side door.

Surrounded, the terrorists had fired a few shots before cutting their engines and stopping in the water. After a half hour, they’d agreed to talk, and a small rubber dinghy had been launched from the gunboat with a cell phone. Apparently, the group was split on how to proceed; some of them wanted to surrender, but others-apparently foreigners, as they spoke to Lucy in Arabic and Urdu-refused. They’d been told they had until nine, which was now only a few minutes away.

“Something’s happening!” Blanchett shouted.