Counterplay

Epilogue

October

Karp glanced at his watch. Four o’clock. Still, plenty of time to hear the verdict, congratulate Guma, then meet up with Marlene, swing by the loft to grab the kids, and make it to the synagogue in time for the twins’ bar mitzvah class.

Word that the jury in the Emil Stavros murder trial had reached their verdict had come an hour ago…more than two weeks after summations and deliberations had been delayed due to the events at St. Patrick’s.

Jon Ellis had wanted to make a deal with Stavros, who, according to his lawyer, had quite a bit of information on al Qaeda banking practices and the accounts he was supposed to send the ransom money to after the transfer from the Vatican bank. He’d be placed in a Witness Protection Program and given immunity from further prosecution for his role in the weekend’s events, as well as the murder trial.

In a meeting with Karp, Guma, Murrow, and Jaxon, Ellis hinted that he didn’t need “the locals’ ” permission “seeing as how this is a national security matter” but was asking as a “matter of courtesy.” Karp told him where he could stick his courtesy and that Stavros was still a prisoner under the lock and key of the New York City criminal justice system and under the jurisdiction of the Honorable Paul Lussman of the New York County Supreme Court, Trial Part 34.

I’m sure the media will be interested in a story about how you vouched for “Agent Hodges,” also known as Andrew Kane, and almost got the Pope and two thousand other people killed, Karp said looking the assistant director in the eyes until the man stood as if to leave.

This isn’t the end of this, Karp, Ellis said.

Damn straight it isn’t, Karp said. So don’t be surprised if you receive a subpoena to testify before a New York County grand jury.

Ellis glared for a moment longer at Karp, then laughed and shook his head as he turned to Jaxon. You coming? he asked.

Jaxon kicked back in his chair. No, he said. I have other matters to discuss with Mr. Karp.

Ellis stormed from the room as Guma quipped, See you in court.

When he was gone, Jaxon gave the others the “official” explanation being handed down by Homeland Security’s public relations office. Agent Hodges came from another agency, and therefore wasn’t personally known to Ellis, except by reputation, Jaxon said. Heads will roll…supposedly…but not Ellis’s. Obviously, Kane went to great lengths to alter his appearance and was able to force the real Hodges to reveal information, including passwords and such, that only an agent would have. Ellis was as stunned as anyone…at least that’s his story, and he’s sticking to it.

In other words, Ellis has “plausible deniability” going for him? Murrow asked. But what about the Russian agent? Nadya Malovo.

Jaxon shook his head. She wouldn’t say anything to us, he replied. The Russian government is, of course, denying any knowledge of her involvement in a conspiracy to blow up St. Patrick’s and blame it on Chechen nationalists. They’re labeling her “a rogue element” and making noises that they want her returned so that she can be prosecuted in Moscow.

You guys going to go along with that? Karp scowled.

Jaxon shrugged. I hope not, but it may not be up to the Justice Department, he said. Homeland Security and the administration are desperate to keep the Russians involved in the “War on Terror;” so saving the Russians embarrassment might trump federal charges of murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder, kidnapping, and various other crimes that fit under the terrorism label.

And, of course, Putin canceled his appearance at the United Nations to explain the need for continued Russian occupation of Chechnya, Karp noted.

Yeah…and the rumors are that the administration is going to trade Malovo and keeping a lid on Russian involvement at St. Patrick’s in exchange for the Russians sitting down for “meaningful dialogue” with the nationalists, Jaxon said, which, if something came of it, would be a blow to the Russians and al Qaeda, but I’m not holding my breath.

On a sad note, the bodies of the Homeland Security agents who had been assigned to work with the fake Agent Hodges on security inside the cathedral had been discovered in a parking garage near Columbia University. But on the brighter side, the real Agent Hodges had been found in the cabin of Kane’s speedboat-bound and gagged, but alive. Apparently, Kane had planned to dump him in the Hudson as if he’d been abducted from the ambulance with Lucy and then killed. He’s been reunited with his family, Jaxon said, and a former priest who had an outstanding warrant out for sexually molesting children and was tailing the family for Kane, was arrested with Hodges’s help.

Karp looked around the courtroom. Guma was chatting amiably with detectives Fairbrother and Bassaline. With surprise he noted that Amarie Bliss Stavros was sitting on the prosecution side of the aisle with her arm around Zachary. Meanwhile, those sitting at the defense table appeared as if they were on their way to a good friend’s funeral.

Anderson looked like the bully on the playground who’d just had the shit kicked out of him by the new kid he’d tried to pick on. He hazarded a quick glance back at the blond reporter and, Karp thought, probably wished he hadn’t; she was staring at him with open contempt. Karp half expected her to mouth the word loser.

Unshaved and crumpled-looking in his jail jumpsuit, Stavros just sat morosely looking at the table. He’d tried claiming that he’d been blackmailed into cooperating with Kane and pointed to Dante Coletta as his wife’s killer. But Coletta started squealing as soon as Fairbrother got him to the Tombs-admitting to his part in the murder and burial in exchange for eight to twelve years at Attica for conspiracy. Given the circumstances, Judge Lussman had allowed Guma to put Coletta back on the stand to recant his original testimony.

Hear that banging? Guma had asked Karp after Coletta’s testimony.

What banging? Karp asked, puzzled.

The last nail going into Stavros’s coffin.

There were still many unresolved questions from what Ariadne Stupenagel in a “special report” for the Times had called “The Siege at St. Patrick’s.” The biggest blank was whatever happened to Kane and Grale. The official view of the NYPD was that the two were “missing, presumed dead,” but no bodies had been found after extensive searches of the banks of the Harlem and Hudson rivers. But Karp wasn’t going to believe that either man was gone, not until he’d seen the bodies himself.

Now, Karp and everyone else in the courtroom jumped to their feet when Judge Lussman entered the courtroom and remained standing while the judge brought in the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?”

“We have, Your Honor,” the foreman said. He handed the paperwork to the court clerk who took it to the judge for his perusal.

Lussman glanced quickly at the verdict sheet and handed it back to the clerk who walked it over to the foreman. “Would you read your verdict, please,” the judge said.

“We find the defendant guilty…”

They all knew what was coming but spectators, lawyers, defendants, and witnesses held their breath.

“…of murder…”

As the foreman read off the guilty verdicts for the remaining counts and reporters ran from the courtroom to file their stories, Karp turned to Guma and shook his hand as he pretended not to see the tears that had welled up in his friend’s eyes. “Congratulations, pal, you did it again.”

Guma nodded, too choked up to speak. He picked up the photograph of Teresa and Zachary, looked at it one last time, and then placed it in the file that would be stored in a vault. Karp recognized the act as a way of saying good-bye.

Ten minutes later, Karp found Guma again in the hallway speaking to a gaggle of reporters. “Hey, got to go,” he said. “Marlene’s meeting me outside. We’ll catch up and have a drink over this later.”

Guma nodded. “No problem,” he said. “Actually, I have plans tonight as well.” He made eye contact with the little blond television reporter standing with the rest of the pack listening to Murrow, who was happy as a pig in slop. Karp’s lead over Rachman had skyrocketed in the wake of the attack, especially after Stupenagel’s article which, he thought, overly dramatized his own small role in the cathedral and then on the bridge. The reporter smiled at Guma and blushed.

Karp raised his eyebrows. “I see that the Italian Stallion is back in the saddle, or will be. But I thought Teresa was ‘the one.’ ”

Guma smiled and nodded to the reporter. “Maybe, she was,” he said with a shrug. “And maybe I’ll see her on the flip-flop, and we’ll find out. But until then, a man’s got to live, doesn’t he?” With that, Guma walked over and separated the blonde from the others and was soon making her laugh with something he said.

“Yeah, Goom,” Karp said quietly. “A man’s got to live.”

With that, Karp walked down the hall to the elevator and got on for the trip to the lobby. He was thinking about Marlene as he got off. When the dust settled, she and the others involved in the Pope’s rescue had been granted a special audience with His Holiness.

Lucy emerged looking like she’d been told that her beatification was imminent. And Marlene also had been beaming, but she wouldn’t talk about what had been said, except that I got a chance to ask him for a favor for my dad.

Karp sighed as he left the Criminal Courts building. All’s well that end’s well, he thought. Once again, his family had survived another brush with death, and now he was going to meet his beautiful wife, whom he saw waving on the other side of Centre Street.

God, she’s as beautiful now as the day I first met her, he thought and walked toward the curb.

On the other side of the street, Marlene waved again and began to walk toward him. The days following the events at St. Patrick’s had been surreal. First, she’d had to get used to the fact that John Jojola was alive and then forgive him for keeping her in the dark. She listened to his reasoning, accepted it, and then slapped him hard.

Don’t ever do that again, she’d said. I can keep a secret, and I’m a great actress…just ask Butch.

Hey, hey, what do you mean by that, her husband scowled. Then they’d all shared a good laugh.

Jojola, Lucy, and Ned had all spent most of a week relaxing and seeing the sights. At Tran’s insistence, they’d all then boarded his private jet for the flight back to Taos County Airport and were, as the saying went, now happily back home on the range.

Kane was probably dead-and she wasn’t going to lose any more sleep over him. The Pope was safe and so was her family. Life just doesn’t get any better, she thought as she approached the curb.

Karp was so fixated on his bride that he didn’t see the sedan with the dark-tinted windows pull away from the curb and start to roll slowly toward him. But Marlene did and something about how it didn’t pick up speed to join the rest of traffic warned her that something wasn’t right. “Butch, watch out!” she shouted, pointing to the sedan and then reaching into her purse to pull her gun.

Karp saw her point but couldn’t hear her over the honking of taxis and general sound of traffic. He looked and saw a sedan approaching and noticed the window on the passenger side come down. He glanced back at Marlene and saw her darting into traffic with her gun, and only then realized that he was a target.

Karp never saw the person who shot him, just flashes from the gun. The force of the bullets hitting him in the chest, the shoulder, the neck, and leg drove him back, landing on the sidewalk as pedestrians screamed and moved to get out of the way. He looked up at the sky, noticed how white the clouds looked against the blue background…heard more shots, more screams.

Then Marlene’s face appeared above him. She was yelling something and crying. He wanted to tell her it was all right. Don’t cry. I love you. But something was pulling at him, lifting him from the sidewalk and into the air where he could look down, surprised to see his body lying in a spreading pool of blood as his wife and a man he didn’t recognize pressed at his wounds. He noticed the sedan was partly up on the curb, stopped where it had run into Dirty Warren’s newsstand.

Marlene kept pressure on the wounds, but there were too many. She’d been too late, getting through the traffic and emptying her gun into the dark window on the driver’s side. The first bullet had shattered the window, and she’d seen Rachel Rachman turn toward her, her former protegee’s face a mask of hatred and rage. Marlene’s second bullet had obliterated that face, the third turned it into a bloody mass, and the fourth and fifth pulverizing it until there was nothing much left.

The car had drifted past as Marlene ran to her husband and dropped to her knees and began applying pressure to his wounds. But there were too many. “Butch! Butch! Listen to me,” she screamed. “You’re not leaving me, Karp! Don’t leave me, please, baby.”

Lying on the sidewalk, Karp’s eyelids fluttered then closed. His mind was filled with a white light. So that part’s true, he thought. I wonder what’s next. He was ready to go then, almost irritated by Marlene’s screaming. His eyelids opened again. “What?” he said weakly. “Can’t you see I’m sleeping?”