KARP WAS WAITING ON THE subway platform at the Whitehall Street station near Battery Park when he was suddenly aware of a horrible odor. He looked behind him and immediately recognized its source—a hulking man who waved at him with one hand while a finger on the other hand probed his nose. “Oh, hello, Booger,” he said. “I didn’t know you were going to be meeting me tonight.”
As tall as Karp and outweighing him by at least a hundred pounds—it was difficult to say as he wore many layers of cast-off undergarments and coats—the Walking Booger, as this particular street denizen was known, resembled a dirty bear. Every visible inch of him, and there wasn’t much that was, from his hands to his filthy face and massive head was covered with thick wiry hair; two small brown eyes glinted out of the tangled fur, completing the bruin analogy.
“ ’Ello, ’utch,” the giant replied pleasantly, though the nasal excavating hindered his speech. “ ’Irty ’arren ask me ’oo ’elp.”
Karp smiled. Despite his appearance and lack of personal hygiene, the Walking Booger was another of the homeless people frequently seen around the Criminal Courts Building who seemed to watch out for him and his family like some sort of ragtag guardian angels. The citizens of New York City had no idea about the many times when Dirty Warren and the Walking Booger, as well as their other sidewalk compatriots, had helped thwart the aims of criminals and terrorists. Most “normal” citizens pretended not to see the street people, or gave them a wide berth, but over the years he’d met many who except for their circumstances were as upstanding as any of their fellow New Yorkers.
Although it was early evening, there weren’t many other people on the platform, and those who were kept their distance from Karp and his odiferous companion. So they were alone when the train slid up to the platform and they entered the last car, as Karp had been instructed an hour earlier.
• • •
This latest adventure began shortly after Karp spoke to Marlene about her quest up north, when Espy Jaxon had arrived at the office. He came bearing the proverbial good and bad news in the form of a DVD he held up to Karp and then walked over to the entertainment center and inserted the disc.
“I received this via government courier a couple of hours ago,” the agent said. “I have no idea who sent it but apparently someone in either the State Department or the CIA doesn’t like what’s going on. I’ll warn you, some of it’s pretty tough to watch, but it also gives us reason to hope.”
Jaxon picked up the remote control from Karp’s desk, turned on the television, and hit the play button. A face Karp recognized with revulsion appeared on the screen.
“Allahu akbar, I am Sheik Amir Al-Sistani. I am sure you are familiar with the name. Your plan to stop me has failed, as has your attempt to arm the heretic separatists who resist Allah’s will that I establish the Islamic Republic of Chechnya. It doesn’t matter to me that you intended to bring down the apostate government of Syria, except that it is further proof to my Muslim brothers that you Americans will do anything in your hatred of Islam. But hasn’t that always been the way in your arrogance and conceit?”
Jaxon paused the recording. “So apparently we now have an idea of what the other group was doing at the compound. Some sort of arms deal with the separatists and connected to a plan to topple the government of Syria.” He pushed the play button again.
Karp could not contain the gasp that escaped his lips when the camera panned back, revealing his daughter sitting next to a man Jaxon explained was David Huff from the U.S. embassy in Grozny. He hardly heard Al-Sistani’s taunts and felt hot tears come into his eyes as the bare-chested man put a knife to Lucy’s throat.
“It’s okay,” Jaxon assured him. “Nothing happens. He’s using them—as well as his threat to embarrass the administration—as hostages to barter for Abdel-Rahman’s release.”
“That doesn’t mean he won’t eventually kill them,” Karp said, trying to keep the emotion out of his voice. “Particularly if the administration won’t ‘deal with terrorists,’ as we discussed before.”
“I won’t sugarcoat it, you’re right,” Jaxon said. “And to be honest, I don’t think the administration wants them back. Al-Sistani is right about the embarrassment it would cause, especially with less than a week to go before the election.”
“So what do we do? Give this to the press?”
“I thought about it,” Jaxon replied. “The American people certainly deserve to know the truth. But even if the media would follow up—and that’s a big question, the way they pander to this administration—it could backfire and we’d lose Lucy and Huff. The congressional hearings on Chechnya were postponed because of Allen’s death and there’s no way they’d reconvene before the election, so there’s no one on the other side of the aisle to get at the facts. The administration and its lackeys would deny deny deny until after next Tuesday, and then stonewall and say it was a national security issue. And as we’ve discussed, they could fall back on the public policy that the U.S. does not make deals with terrorists, while expressing great remorse—at least when the cameras are rolling—about the ‘brave Americans’ sacrificed for the cause of freedom. In the meantime, Al-Sistani might carry out his threats to kill the hostages to prove he was serious and give him standing in Al Qaeda.”
Karp bowed his head. “So there’s nothing we can do?”
“I didn’t say that. I want you to watch part of the recording again from when Lucy screams.”
Reluctantly, Karp kept his eyes on the screen as “Raad” placed his knife at Lucy’s throat.
“Watch her hands,” Jaxon said as Lucy cried out.
“Please help us! O lion of God, save me!”
A moment later, Karp knew what Jaxon was alluding to. There had been something about her desperate scream that had struck him as so not like Lucy; she’d faced danger before, and because of her deep faith had always accepted the possibility of death with an amazing degree of calm. Now as he watched her, he knew why this was different. “She screamed to distract Al-Sistani from what she was really doing,” he said.
Jaxon smiled. “That’s our girl. Nerves of steel, and it’s not just any sign language that could be picked up by whoever watched that tape. It’s Native American sign language. I didn’t even know that she was conversant in it. But when I saw this, I was sure she was trying to say something; I know some American Sign Language, but it wasn’t until I showed it to John Jojola that we found out what she was doing. He, of course, recognized it right away. Smart girl; apparently, she didn’t want the usual intelligence agencies who saw this to know what she was saying—she doesn’t trust them any more than we do—and was hoping that somehow I, or I should say, Jojola, would see this.”
Shaking his head over his daughter’s courage and quick thinking, Karp realized that she’d placed her faith in a slim chance that it would pay off. A former Special Forces guerilla fighter during the Vietnam War, Jojola had been the chief of police at his home on the Taos Indian Reservation in New Mexico when he met Marlene and Lucy several years earlier. Marlene and Lucy had gone to New Mexico on a sabbatical, where they became involved with Jojola, who was trying to catch a serial child killer. A deeply spiritual man in the ways of his people, Jojola had shared his beliefs with the women and educated them in the customs and rituals of his people. As their friendship grew, he met Jaxon and joined the team with Lucy and Ned Blanchett.
“So what did she say?” Karp asked.
“Well, as you might imagine, Native American sign language does not translate as literally as American Sign Language, but the gist is that she’s being held in a ‘holy building,’ or site, near ‘big water’ to ‘the east of the battle.’ Putting it together as best we can, we think that means she’s being held in a mosque near the Caspian Sea, probably in Dagestan, which is a hotbed of Islamic extremism and an easy place for Al-Sistani to hide out.”
“Sounds like a big place to start looking,” Karp noted. “I take it there are a lot of mosques in Dagestan.”
“There are, but it’s a relatively small population, most of which is clustered in urban areas. We think she mentioned ‘big water’ because she is aware of her proximity to the Caspian. There’s one more thing. Did you find her comment, ‘O lion of God, save me,’ to be odd, even for our young spiritualist?”
“I did.”
“We didn’t,” Jaxon said. “The Chechen word for lion is lom, as in Lom Daudov, the separatist leader whom the Russians blamed for the attack. He’s the guy my team was trying to contact to help find Al-Sistani before Al-Sistani beat us to the punch. Daudov is known to his followers as ‘the lion of God,’ and ‘Lion’ was our codeword for him.”
“So Lucy was asking him to save her?”
“Yes, I think so, but not directly,” Jaxon replied. “She wouldn’t have thought that Lom would see this disc or know Native American sign language. I think she’s telling us to reach out to Daudov; maybe he knows how to find Al-Sistani.”
“What chance do you have of that . . . before it’s too late?”
“I can’t give you any odds, but it’s the only option I see right now. I have a team standing by but we don’t know where to find him, much less ask for his help, with our own government blaming him for the attack. The Russians are after him with everything they’ve got, and no doubt our people are cooperating with them. So he’s gone into hiding. Nor can we safely ask the CIA to assist with their local contacts because we don’t know the good guys from the bad guys.”
“Then I don’t get it,” Karp said. “How are we going to find Daudov?”
“Well, it’s a long shot, but we think we know one person whom Daudov would be interested in using for his own political purposes, which might make him willing to help us rescue Lucy and Deputy Chief of Mission Huff.”
“Who?”
Jaxon paused to look long and hard at Karp. “Nadya Malovo, known to Daudov as Ajmaani.”
The name settled over the room like a noxious dark cloud. Nadya Malovo was a beautiful Russian assassin who had crossed swords frequently with Karp, his family, and his associates. She worked for the highest bidder, and at one point in the past that had been the Russian government and the Russian mob, for whom she had assumed the identity of Ajmaani, a Chechen Islamic terrorist.
“Why would Daudov want Nadya?” Karp asked.
“If he could get her to tell the truth, and he probably has his ways,” Jaxon said, “she’s proof that at least some of the atrocities committed in Chechnya and Russia that were blamed on separatists were actually manufactured by the Russians as a pretext for invading and controlling Chechnya. She would demonstrate that the idea of a nexus between Islamic extremists and secular nationalists like Daudov is false.”
“So how would we get word to him, even if we had Nadya?” Karp asked.
“We think we can still contact a young woman, Deshi Zakayev, who was our team’s liaison with Daudov,” Jaxon said. “Because there were no female fatalities, we’re hoping she either wasn’t in the compound or escaped. If we can get Nadya, our team will be inserted and make contact with her.”
“That’s a big if,” Karp said. “I don’t even know if she’s still alive or how we would pry her out of the hands of David Grale.”
One of Malovo’s major employers after she left Russia for the United States had been Andrew Kane, an extremely wealthy former NYC mayoral candidate and, more pertinently, an evil mastermind who considered Karp his archnemesis. One of his plots with Malovo had been to blow up a natural gas container ship as it passed beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, only once again to be thwarted by Karp and Company. Kane had managed to elude Jaxon, only to be captured by David Grale, the half-mad leader of a large community of homeless souls known as the Mole People, who lived in the subway tunnels, sewers, and natural caves beneath the city.
Malovo had eventually been caught and sent to a maximum-security federal prison. But she’d plotted her way out of there as well. Almost two years earlier, having claimed to turn over a new leaf, she began assisting U.S. antiterrorism agencies, including Jaxon’s, and helped stop several terrorist plots by infiltrating several groups as Ajmaani. However, the entire time she was actually planning her escape while gaining a financial windfall of enormous proportions.
She hatched a plan for suicide bombers to blow themselves up in the crowd at the annual Halloween Parade in Manhattan’s West Village. One of the bombers had specifically tried to target Karp, who was the parade grand marshal, and his family. But the attack on the parade and the Karp family was only secondary to her real intention, which was to free Kane from Grale. Of course, her efforts were not motivated by any loyalty or feelings for Kane—Karp doubted that she had such emotions—but by the fact that only Kane knew the account numbers and passwords for offshore banks where he’d stashed hundreds of millions of dollars. However, Grale, who always seemed to be one step ahead of his enemies, had discovered her plan and was waiting for her when she dared enter the inner sanctum of his dark kingdom. Word on the street from the likes of Dirty Warren was that, like Kane, Malovo was now a captive, too.
Years of entreaties by Karp through intermediaries to convince Grale to release his two prisoners to his office for prosecution had been rejected. Dirty Warren said that foul-ups by law enforcement agencies, such as releasing Amir Al-Sistani, even though that was not Karp’s fault and he would have stopped it if he could, had soured Grale on cooperating, though he liked Karp personally.
But there was one thing Karp hadn’t tried. He looked at his watch and stood up. “I think the only chance we have of getting Malovo is for me to go ask Grale personally,” he said.
Standing as well, Jaxon frowned. “That could be dangerous. What I understand from talking to Lucy is that he’s subject to wild mood swings, maybe schizophrenia, and sometimes even his followers are afraid of him.”
“It’s about my daughter,” Karp said. “And maybe the country’s future. But I need to get to Dirty Warren before he closes up for the day, and it’s almost that time. You coming?”
As the two men rode the elevator to the ground floor, Karp wondered how Marlene was coming with her expedition; he hadn’t heard from her since she was about to arrive in Orvin in the upstate New York Finger Lakes region. He wished she would have taken at least Clay for backup, but she wasn’t willing to wait for him, nor was she sure of finding who she was looking for. “And I don’t want to waste his time,” she said, “if it’s a wild goose chase.” But he wasn’t too worried; his wife could be as lethal as a venomous snake if challenged, and Stupenagel was no pushover. She said she wasn’t getting good reception, he assured himself.
They reached the sidewalk just as Dirty Warren was lowering the heavy wooden panel that secured his newsstand for the night. “Why don’t you hang back a little,” Karp told Jaxon. “He might be more comfortable talking about Grale if it’s just me.”
As Jaxon waited, he continued forward and called out, “Hey, Warren, got a minute?”
Hearing his friend’s voice, Dirty Warren turned toward Karp with a smile on his face but frowned when he saw the situation was serious. “Sure, Butch . . . whoop balls . . . what’s up?”
“I need to talk to David,” Karp replied. “As soon as possible. It’s important.”
“What? Whoop!”
“David Grale. I have to talk to him. Tonight. Now.”
“Uh, that’s what I thought you said . . . oh boy fuck me whoop . . . not possible.”
“Why not?”
“Well, for starters, even when . . . oh boy ohhhhh boy . . . David’s in a—how should I put this delicately—good mood you don’t just drop by for a . . . bullshit asshole . . . visit,” Dirty Warren said, the nervous tics that were part of his Tourette’s syndrome threatening to take over his face while his torrent of profanity increased. “And he’s definitely not in a good mood these days; in fact, he’s in very . . . whoop whoop . . . bad mood. Very bad. I don’t even go there when he’s like this. You never know what he’s going to do . . . motherfucking scumbag whoop . . . or who he might decide is ‘evil.’ And you know what that would mean.”
Dirty Warren shuddered at the thought, and Karp understood that his quirky friend was truly afraid. But as he’d just said to Jaxon, his daughter’s life was on the line. “Please, Warren,” he pleaded. “It’s about Lucy. She’s in danger.”
The little news vendor’s pale blue eyes widened beneath the thick lenses of his glasses and then he nodded. “Okay,” he said. “But only you. Espy can’t go. David doesn’t know him.”
“I may need him,” Karp said. He quickly explained what he hoped to accomplish.
The nervous tics increased, as did his hopping from foot to foot. “Oh, Christ . . . whoop whoooooop . . . that’s what you want? Oh, geez . . . ass balls tits whoop whoop oh boy ohhhhhh boy. Well, they still can’t go; they’d never even get to David. If David doesn’t cut my throat for bringing you, and if he doesn’t cut us both into quivering pieces afterward, and if he agrees to let you have Malovo—and I don’t think he’s going to—he’ll provide the escort until she’s handed over to your guys on the outside. Personally, I think we’re dead men. Give me an hour and I’ll call on your cell phone to let you know.”
As promised, Dirty Warren called in about an hour. “At first he just laughed at me . . . whoop . . . it wasn’t a nice laugh. But then I told him that Lucy was . . . cocks scumbag oh boy . . . in trouble, and he said he’d listen to you but not to get your hopes up.”
Dirty Warren said that Jaxon and any others would have to wait in Battery Park, but for Karp to go down into the subway and wait on the platform. “Get in the last car,” he said. “You’re going to . . . oh boy whoop . . . take a ride. No guarantees you’ll be coming back. I hate to say this . . . asswipe bastard . . . because I love the man, but David’s crazy.”
• • •
When they got on the train, Karp saw Dirty Warren sitting in the back of the otherwise empty car. Just before the doors closed, a young black man came running down the stairs intending to get into their car, but Booger grabbed him by the chest and propelled him back out of the car.
The train pulled away from the platform and headed uptown. Each time it stopped and anyone tried to get on, Booger charged down the aisle shouting at the top of his lungs. “ ’ Et off ! ’Et off !” No one argued with him.
Meanwhile, Karp and Dirty Warren rode silently. The train traveled north and then, shortly after leaving the 42nd Street station, it slowed and then stopped in the tunnel. The train operator’s voice came on over the intercom. “We have stopped for a routine maintenance crew to depart. Please keep your seats and stand back from the doors.”
Dirty Warren stood up just as the car’s doors slid open. “This is where we get off. Watch your . . . whoop whoop . . . step.”
Wondering how in the hell Grale was able to command the city subway, Karp followed Dirty Warren and Booger out of the car and down onto the tracks. Then the doors shut and the train moved on. He found himself standing outside a door marked “Authorized Personnel Only” beneath a dim light. It seemed like no surprise when Dirty Warren produced a key that opened the door. Then for the next half hour or so he did his best to keep up with the other two as they made their way through a series of service tunnels—up and down ladders, sloshing through sewers with several inches of foul-smelling liquid in the dark as rats scurried across their path—and natural caves.
Dirty Warren had a small flashlight, which was often the only source of illumination for their path, and sometimes in the dark Karp felt as if he was being watched by unseen eyes. When, during a stop to catch his breath, he commented on it, Dirty Warren told him to ignore it. “It’s best not to think about what else and who else . . . oh boy whoop . . . lives down here. Nobody messes with Booger but I wouldn’t . . . balls boobs . . . want to come alone, and you should never try.”
They were in what seemed to be a large tunnel, though it was so dark that Karp couldn’t see his hand in front of his face and could only follow the beam of the flashlight, when a voice spoke up in front of them.
Suddenly a lantern was lit and two men—one short and fat, the other tall and thin—stepped out of an alcove carved into the rock. “Well, if it ain’t his lordship, Butch Karp,” the tall, skinny one said with a grand bow. “He put me away for robbery once, he did, a looooooong time ago.”
“You deserved it, Clyde,” the short, fat one said. “You were guilty as sin.”
“Right you are, Bert, right you are. But turned over a new leaf, I have, thanks to Father Grale, and look at all it’s done for me,” Clyde replied with a sweep of his hand to encompass their dark surroundings.
“Saved your immortal soul, that’s what it did for you, you fool,” Bert said. “Now let these good folks pass us by. You are expected, Mr. Karp.”
“Thank you,” Karp said, nodding.
They walked for another five minutes, at last coming to a cavern the size of a large indoor sports arena. It was lit by hundreds of electric bulbs, and Karp recalled stories he’d been told that Grale’s followers included electricians who’d tapped into the subway power lines. Several dozen people were on the main floor of the cavern talking, while children kicked balls and chased each other around; others seemed to be working at tasks, such as sorting food and other items brought down from the world above. He could see many more inhabitants going about their personal lives in what appeared to be small rooms carved into the wall.
They all stopped what they were doing and looked when Dirty Warren led him out into the open space. “Hey, it’s Butch Karp!” someone yelled. Others started talking to each other until the cavern buzzed with a hundred voices; those people on the floor drew closer and those in the rooms emerged to see what the fuss was about.
“ENOUGH!” a voice roared from one end of the cavern. “Go about your business!”
The inhabitants didn’t need to be told twice. Some cast a fearful glance in the direction the voice had come from. Karp, too, looked that way and saw the man he’d come to ask for a favor. At the far end of the cavern, on what appeared to be a long-abandoned subway platform from another century, David Grale sat slumped in a large, overstuffed chair.
“This way . . . whoop whoop . . . Butch,” Dirty Warren, clearly nervous, said. “Mustn’t keep him waiting . . . oh boy ass balls.”
Karp followed the little news vendor up to the dais, where he stood before the King of the Mole People like a supplicant approaching a feudal monarch. Many years earlier, Grale had been a Catholic layperson whom Lucy had befriended when they worked together in a soup kitchen for the homeless. Ten years his junior, she’d developed a schoolgirl crush on the handsome, gentle man, not realizing that at night he transformed into a religious vigilante who hunted down and killed violent criminals he claimed were actually demons inhabiting the bodies of humans. His dual nature had gone undetected for quite some time before he was found out and had to flee—a wanted man by the police—to a life beneath the streets, where he took refuge among the homeless and unwanted and came to be regarded as their spiritual and temporal leader.
Over the years, Grale had slowly drifted in and out of madness as he vacillated between his better nature and the darkness that made him moody and dangerous. Karp knew that Grale was a serial killer, no matter if his victims “deserved” their fates. However, his views on the man were tempered by the fact that the “Mad Monk of Manhattan,” as the journalist Ariadne Stupenagel had labeled him in a recent feature article, had often acted as a guardian angel watching over his family. He was particularly fond of Lucy, and despite his murderous ways, she didn’t judge him.
Deeply spiritual, Lucy had long believed that her family’s seemingly endless run-ins with sociopaths and terrorists were not just happenstance or solely tied to her parents’ professions, but part of a larger war between good and evil. And she saw Grale as an avenging angel of God. “Like it or not, his fate and ours are tied together,” she’d once told her father.
Looking up at the man, Karp was shocked by his appearance. He was clad in a plain brown monk’s robe, his thin face was pale as moonlight, his dark eyes glittering with fever or madness from their deep-set sockets, and sweat beaded up on his forehead. His hair was long and stringy, and his beard and mustache more unkempt than the last time Karp had seen him. He clutched a handkerchief in one hand on which Karp could see spots of bright red blood. I heard he was tubercular, he thought. Jesus, he looks like death warmed over.
“Hello, Butch,” Grale said in his low, gravelly voice. “Welcome to my home. Forgive my oversight at not having invited you earlier, but we’re both such busy people.” He laughed but was stopped short by a fit of coughing into the cloth.
“Thank you for seeing me now,” Karp replied. But before he could go on, there was a rattling of a chain and a dog . . . no, a man on all fours . . . came crawling out from behind Grale’s “throne.”
It took Karp a moment to recognize the sorry creature, who seemed to be all skin and bones. The expensively coiffed wavy blond hair had been reduced to a few gray wisps, and the blue eyes that had charmed so many had been reduced to one wildly staring eyeball, while the other was just a white, sightless globe. The man’s countenance was hideously disfigured by a botched face transplant he’d undergone many years earlier in order to disguise himself; discolored skin hung like shredded tissue paper on parts of his face while appearing normal elsewhere.
“Kane?” Karp said. The man was evil, but to see him reduced to such an abysmal condition shocked him.
At the mention of his name, what was left of Andrew Kane crawled forward to focus on the tall man standing in front of his master. Then he snarled, pulling his thin lips back from a nearly toothless mouth, and rage caught fire in his one good eye. “Kaaaaarrrrpppp,” he hissed, and it appeared he might try to leap on his old enemy. But Grale yanked hard on the chain around Kane’s neck, pulling him roughly onto his back.
“Down, dog,” Grale growled at Kane, who rolled over onto his side and remained there cowering. Grale then turned back to Karp and smiled, revealing that he, too, had few teeth left in his mouth. “So, Butch, you didn’t come all of this way to say hi to me or my dog. My friend Warren tells me you have a request?” His voice grew hard and his face set as if in stone as he finished his sentence.
Karp nodded. “I need to ask you to hand over Nadya Malovo . . . if she is still alive.”
“Alive?” Grale asked. “Oh, that devil is alive all right.” He leaned back in his chair and shouted. “Bring Malovo!”
After a minute, two large, muscular men emerged from the dark tunnel at one end of the platform. Each was holding a chain, the other end of which was attached to a thick leather collar fastened around the neck of a woman; her hands were bound behind her and her legs were hobbled by knotted ropes. However, if Karp was surprised to see how captivity had reduced Andrew Kane to barely human, he was just as surprised to see how well Nadya Malovo appeared to have handled two years of underground captivity. Her face was pale from the lack of sun and her short, formerly blond hair was now as white as snow, but she stood erect with her head up, and the seductress’s body still retained its curves. She regarded him without expression with her sea green eyes.
Grale seemed to guess at Karp’s surprise, because he suddenly heaved himself up from the chair and stalked across the platform until he stood in front of the prisoner. He grabbed her beneath her chin and turned her face until she had to look him in the eyes. That’s when Karp noticed one other difference in Nadya Malovo. He’d never known her to exhibit fear, but her eyes betrayed that she was definitely afraid of her captor. She quailed and shut her eyes.
“Still alive and still beautiful, no?” Grale said as he released his grip. “Thus Satan’s most effective minions are pleasant to look at on the outside while festering with evil beneath the lovely skin.”
“She is evil, no doubt,” Karp said. “But I’m asking you to release her into my custody.”
Malovo’s eyes flew open and she looked at Karp with both curiosity and what he took to be hope. But Grale turned and walked over toward Karp until he was towering above him, his eyes glittering with anger.
“Why? So that our so-called justice system can let her go to kill innocent people?” he raged. “Law enforcement had her in its custody before, as they did Andrew Kane and Amir Al-Sistani, and yet she got away!”
“Those were other agencies, not the New York District Attorney’s Office,” Karp replied evenly. “I’ve successfully prosecuted many of their associates, as well as a great many other people you believe are inhabited by demons.”
Grale frowned. “I’m not blaming you, Butch. I know the sort of man you are—a man of integrity. However, even you do not control everything that goes on in the world at large. I could hand her over to you confident that if possible you would bring her to justice; but there are others out there who might be able to force you to give her up to them. Those men I do not trust.”
“I’m not saying they wouldn’t try,” Karp agreed. “And possibly even succeed—the federal government is no friend of mine. But they won’t get the chance, because I intend to hand her over to someone else myself.”
Grale’s eyes widened and he looked as if he was going to shout him down, but Karp softly added, “David, Lucy’s in trouble, a captive of Al-Sistani. The only hope I have to save her is by using Malovo as bait to get her back.”
At the mention of Lucy’s name, Grale’s features softened. His hand passed over his eyes, and when he looked at Karp again, he more closely resembled the gentle social worker who’d dedicated himself to the poor. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I forgot that Warren said this was somehow tied to Lucy. My mind seems to wander these days. What can you tell me?”
“I’d rather not say in front of anyone but you,” Karp replied. “No disrespect intended, Warren.”
“None . . . whoop whoop . . . taken, Butch,” Dirty Warren said. “I’m one of those ‘need to know’ sort of . . . oh boy breasts asses . . . guys. And I don’t need to know.”
“Please, join me up here then,” Grale said, pointing to a stepladder. “The rest of you please excuse us. Take Malovo and Kane back to their cells.”
After the prisoners were led away, Karp settled into the chair next to Grale’s throne. He then gave a condensed version of all that had transpired since the attack on the mission in Zandaq.
When he reached the part regarding the DVD disc and Al-Sistani’s threats, Grale’s face grew grim. “I should have slit his throat when I had him in my custody.” This wasn’t the first time Grale had been asked to rescue Lucy from Al-Sistani. As with Kane and Malovo, he’d once captured the Islamic terrorist, but had then exchanged him for Lucy, who had been kidnapped by Kane.
Finished with his account, Karp remained silent while Grale sat with his head down and his eyes closed. The mad monk was so quiet that for a moment Karp wondered if he’d fallen asleep, but then the brown eyes flew open and his hands gripped the arms of his chair. “If there’s any chance that we can save Lucy, then we have to take it,” he said.
With that Grale led the way back to “cells”—holes cut in the walls that had been fitted with steel bars and small steel doors, outside of which stood a guard of four men, including the two muscular men who’d brought Malovo out. He walked up to the cell where Malovo sat on a cot.
“I’m turning you over to the district attorney of New York City,” he said. “However, if you and I ever meet again, I will kill you, and it won’t be quick; I promise that your torment will last for one hundred days. You are evil, Nadya Malovo, and I don’t know that there is any part of your soul that can still be redeemed. But if it’s possible, you may find the opportunity to do so in the days ahead. And I hope that you will take it.”
Malovo said nothing but looked at Karp. Grale turned to Booger and Dirty Warren. “My men here will escort you and the prisoner,” he said. “If she attempts to escape, Booger, please do us all a favor and strangle her.”
“I ’romise,” Booger replied, holding up his right hand as if taking an oath. “If she ’ries ’oo ’scape, I ’ill ’rangle ’er with my ’are ’ands.”
As they turned to go back to the cavern, Andrew Kane suddenly scampered to the front of his cell and put a hand out toward Karp. “Please,” he begged, “take me with you. I will tell you everything.”
Karp looked at Grale, but the King of the Mole People shook his head. “Not today,” he said. “Perhaps someday you will visit me again and we can discuss it. But for now this dog remains in his kennel.”
An hour later, a very odd-looking group emerged from the Whitehall station and walked hurriedly toward Battery Park. Even though the immediate vicinity appeared to be deserted—Grale had sent a swift vanguard ahead to ensure it—they moved in a tight cluster so that no one would notice the hobbling, bound woman in their midst.
Once in the park, they approached two black Hummers, from which a half-dozen men emerged. One was Jaxon, another Jojola, with four more, younger men whom Karp didn’t recognize, and then, to his surprise, his cousin Ivgeny Karchovski.
“Mr. Jaxon informed me what was going on with my cousin, Lucy,” the Russian mobster explained in heavily accented English. “He and I thought, perhaps, that my knowledge of the area and my experience with some of these people might help.”
Karp was touched. Their polar-opposite careers kept him and his cousin from open social contact but his fate, too, appeared to be tied to that of Karp and his family. “Thank you,” he said.
Smiling, Karchovski said, “This is what family is for, no?”
“Okay, Butch, she’s all . . . whoop whooooop oh boy . . . yours,” Dirty Warren said, nodding to Malovo’s handlers, who detached the chains from the collar.
“I can’t thank you enough, Warren,” Karp said. “Once again you’ve proven to be a true friend.”
“Well . . . son of a bitch whoop . . . you could let me win at movie trivia one of these times,” the little man said with a grin.
Karp smiled. “You wouldn’t want me to give you one, would you?”
Dirty Warren appeared to think about it for a moment, but then shook his head. “Nah, fair and square. I want . . . butt boobies . . . to win fair and square.”
“I knew you would,” Karp replied as Dirty Warren and the others walked away into the night.
When they were gone, he looked at Jaxon. “The prisoner is now yours,” he said.
As one of Jaxon’s men stepped forward to place a belly chain around her waist and handcuff her to it, Malovo smiled at Karp. “How do you know I won’t betray these men the first chance I get?”
Karp locked eyes with her and then shrugged. “I don’t. I don’t know what role you’re going to play in all of this before the end, but then neither do you. But I hope you’ll remember Grale’s admonition about your soul.”
Malovo sneered. “The concepts of souls, heaven, and hell are for the weak,” she scoffed. “What I care about is me.”
“Then I hope that you will find a reason to do the right thing if needed . . . for your own sake,” Karp replied.
As Malovo was led away to one of the Hummers with the four younger men, Karp reached out and placed his hand on Jaxon’s shoulder. “Bring my daughter home, Espy,” he said, his voice cracking.
“God willing, Butch,” Jaxon replied. “God willing.”