KARP STARED WEARILY FOR A moment at the telephone on his desk when it rang. It was 2:00 a.m. on Wednesday, the day after the election. He knew who the call was from, Clay Fulton, and what the caller would say, that Rod Fauhomme and Tucker Lindsey were in custody. What he didn’t know as he reached for the receiver was what would happen now or how it would all end.
After the shoot-out several days earlier, Marlene had called, but she was circumspect in what she was willing to say over the telephone other than that he needed to get to Orvin as soon as possible. So he’d contacted Fulton, who arranged for an NYPD helicopter to whisk them north.
In Orvin, they’d been met by Constable Tom Spooner, who took them to Allen’s cabin where Marlene, Stupenagel, and Jenna Blair were waiting. Following a quick rundown from the others, Karp had interviewed Blair with Fulton present. He then viewed Allen’s taped testimony he intended to give at the congressional hearings, the private message he’d left for Blair, and the webcam recording of the murder on Blair’s laptop.
Afterward he took a half hour to sit by himself on the front deck jotting notes down on a legal pad in the light of a lantern with a blanket around his shoulders. When at last he laid down his pencil, Karp took a moment to reflect on the quiet tranquillity as the eastern sky grew light and the loons called on the lake and contrasted it against the violence that had occurred there just a few hours earlier. And for what? Power? Ego? Ambition?
Karp rose and walked into the cabin, where he called the others together around the kitchen table. “I have a plan,” he said. “It won’t be easy to pull off. We’re up against some very powerful people who apparently will stop at nothing—not even murder—to accomplish their goals.” He looked at Spooner. “And I’ll understand if you decide this isn’t your fight.” His eyes next fell on Blair. “And it’s going to be particularly rough on you.”
Blair’s eyes narrowed and her jaw set. “You know where I stand.”
Karp nodded, then turned back to Spooner, who said, “I’m in. I saw how these guys operate. That’s not what I fought for in ’68. What do you need from me?”
“Time,” Karp responded. “I’m going to need a couple of days before our suspects learn the truth about what happened to Baum and his partner. I have a trap in mind and want them to think the evidence—Jenna’s computer—is still out there and so is she. Obviously we have to tell them something, maybe a car wreck, just not that we know they were trying to murder Jenna and Stupenagel and then died in a gunfight with you and my wife. The problem is they’ll want to verify the story, and as soon as their people see bullet holes, the whole car wreck scenario will be out the window, and they’ll know something’s up.”
Spooner smiled. “Well, it just so happens that my best friend from high school, who then joined the army with me back in the day, is currently the special agent in charge of the Albany office. I’ll give him a call.”
And that’s how Karp’s plan was put into action, beginning with Spooner’s conversation with his FBI friend. “I didn’t go into detail and he didn’t ask,” Spooner reported. “But I could feel his eyebrows shooting up even over the telephone line. Still, we didn’t do a bunch of crawling around in the jungle together without being able to ask for a favor without a lot of questions. He’s going to call Lindsey and tell them I got in touch with him about the car wreck and finding the NSA cards. He’ll head them off by saying he’s coming up to check on the bodies and get my report, which he’ll of course forward back to them. And he’ll give them my number. I expect I’ll be hearing from this Lindsey fella pretty quick.”
As predicted, Tucker Lindsey called Spooner and was recorded. “Same thing with the computer; if it’s located, no one is to touch it, it contains highly classified material.” Then, with Karp orchestrating the timing, Blair waited for two hours before she contacted Connie Rae Lee, pretending to be panicked by the appearance of Baum and wanting to be rid of the computer. “With just enough ‘do what I say or I’ll give it to the media’ to sell it,” Karp advised.
In this, as well as other subsequent parts of his plan, Karp was playing hunches based on what he’d gleaned so far from talking to Blair, Spooner, and Stupenagel, as well as Allen’s recordings. For instance, he knew that Connie Rae Lee could be the key to getting to the man behind the curtain—Fauhomme. Clearly she passed on anything Blair told her directly to Fauhomme. In fact, judging by how quickly Baum had been sent to grab Blair and her computer at her apartment, he suspected that Fauhomme was standing next to her when Blair called.
Karp was counting on a similar situation—either with Fauhomme present or Lee passing on the information quickly and Fauhomme then responding—when he told Blair to place the call to Lee. It had quickly become clear that Fauhomme was present and calling the shots. In doing so the president’s campaign manager had further implicated himself, as well as confirming what Karp suspected about Lindsey’s being up to his eyeballs in the plots and not some unwitting bystander.
So he knew Blair’s story was true. The problem was how to meet his own criteria for prosecution by the New York County District Attorney’s Office. Karp insisted before going forward with a case that first there must be factual guilt, not a best guess or “most likely” theory, but a thousand percent certainty. Second, if there was factual guilt then there must be legally admissible evidence to convict a defendant beyond a reasonable doubt. So even if certain of a defendant’s factual guilt, if there was insufficient legally admissible evidence then the case would not go forward.
It was all about due process. The difference between factual guilt and having legally admissible evidence was the difference between knowing the truth and being able to legally prove it. For example, the prosecution might have compelling evidence that was the result of a search of a defendant’s place of business, but the court might determine that a search warrant was required and without it the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated. Similarly, the court might very well strike down a trustworthy and incriminating statement voluntarily given by the accused if the court found that the statement was the product of a “custodial interrogation” that required Miranda warnings that were not given, thereby violating the defendant’s Fifth Amendment rights. In both examples, the defendant was factually guilty, but the evidence was inadmissible and could not be used.
Karp was not willing to deprive any man of his freedom without due process. Not even one he detested like Rod Fauhomme.
It was no open-and-shut case. He was going to have to convince the jury that an American general and acting director of the CIA had been murdered by a rogue former Marine acting in concert with the president’s campaign manager and his national security adviser to cover up a foreign policy debacle that threatened the president’s election bid.
He would have Blair’s story and the tapes, plus Stupenagel’s testimony. But obviously the defense would attack Blair’s credibility. She slept with men for money. That was how she’d met Allen. They’d already “let slip” to the media that Allen had been having an affair with her. Obviously, they’d exploit that and use it to obfuscate the prosecution’s case.
Baum could be tied to Lindsey through the NSA identification cards. But the defense could claim he was a rogue agent acting for others or in his own interests. Maybe even claim the cards were forgeries. But Lindsey had admitted that the dead men were his agents. The call Karp had Blair place to Connie Lee in which Lee suggested that her friend meet the president’s national security adviser to hand over the computer had driven a nail in the defendants’ coffin.
However, Karp always operated under the premise that there was no such thing as too much incriminating evidence, so he played a couple more hunches. One was that despite Lindsey’s assurances that he would come alone, Karp was sure he would have a team standing by ready to swoop into the theater and take Blair into custody. “But before the guys in the dark suits, aviator glasses, and black Hummers appear, he’ll make sure she’s in the theater,” he noted to the others, looking specifically at Fulton, “which means he’ll be in radio contact with his team. I want to know what he says from the moment he arrives.”
In addition to wiring the theater so that they could record the exchange between Lindsey and Blair, the NYPD “techno-geek” who’d worked for Fulton was positioned in the building across from the theater when Lindsey arrived. He then quickly located the frequency of Lindsey’s radio and recorded everything that was said. “If she runs, take her down.”
Of course, any number of things could have gone wrong, such as Lindsey’s team going into the theater with him and preventing Blair’s escape. That could have been dangerous for the young woman; as Marlene pointed out, it wouldn’t be enough to have the computer, the witness would have to be silenced. So a bum pushing a shopping cart, a prostitute on the street corner, and a hot dog vendor—all NYPD cops and part of Fulton’s DAO team—were ready to move and prevent any “shot while escaping” scenarios, just in case. But the plan had worked to perfection; Jenna escaped without having to alert the bad guys that the DAO was on to them.
Still, Karp needed to tie Fauhomme to the computer. His assessment of the man’s character and paranoia determined it was a good bet that Lindsey had been instructed to take the computer to Fauhomme so that he could see what was on it. So Karp asked the computer expert if there was a way to track the computer’s whereabouts, as well as plant a listening device on the machine.
“The problem is that if I just install, say, a GPS device that is constantly broadcasting its position,” the computer expert explained, “if someone does even a cursory sweep looking for the device, and I assume they will, they’ll find it. Same thing with any physical bug I add to the machine’s hardware.”
“So it can’t be done without being discovered?” Karp asked.
“I didn’t say that. What I can do is install a couple of apps in the software and bury them so deep that the bad guys would have to have someone like me go through all that computer language and know what they were looking for to find it. Both of the apps would be ‘sleepers’—they won’t turn on until someone tries to view the webcam recording. When someone does, the apps will ‘wake up’; one will send a signal as to its location and the other will turn on the computer’s microphone. I’m betting that only the main guys will be allowed to open that recording file, too. They’re not going to want to let just any techno-geek like me see that.”
“I believe you’re right there,” Karp said. “And they think they’re getting the computer from a frightened young woman, not a ‘computer savant.’ That sort of subterfuge probably won’t cross their minds. So have we made a copy of the webcam recording?”
The technician shook his head. “No, I waited on that,” he said. “If we download it or attempt to send it via email, these guys would be able to know that. So I made a copy the old-fashioned way; I set up a video camera and recorded it. It’s not a great copy, but not bad either if they go ahead and destroy the original, which is what I would do.”
That plan, too, had worked like a charm. Then he moved swiftly to indict Fauhomme and Lindsey for murder but still waited until after the election to have them arrested. Although he had questions about how high up the cover-up of the events in Chechnya and Allen’s murder went, it wasn’t his job to tell the American public whom to choose as their next president. And more important, the fallout from the arrests was going to be immediate and intense; he didn’t want to give any credence to accusations that he’d timed the indictments solely to influence the election.
Karp sighed as he picked up the receiver. Tomorrow the firestorm would begin. But tonight he was a father with a missing daughter whose life hung in the balance.
“Yeah?” he said into the phone.
“We have them, Butch,” Fulton replied. “And more than we bargained for.”
The big man had noticed Fauhomme’s girlfriend had a bruised face and noted her venomous statement telling her boyfriend to call his own attorney. So as soon as he’d deposited Fauhomme in the police car along with Lindsey—and told the uniformed D.C. officer to stay in the car and “take notes” on anything they said—he’d gone back up to talk to Connie Rae Lee.
Fulton could be physically intimidating, particularly if he was angry and scowling. But when the occasion called for it, he could be a big teddy bear who put witnesses and sometimes even suspects at ease so that they’d talk freely.
When he first went back into the condominium, Lee had been reluctant to say anything, he told Karp. But he sat her down on the couch, got her a drink of water and a cold washcloth to press on her bruise, and then said that she didn’t deserve to be mistreated. He later told Karp that she’d looked like she was about to burst into tears and that’s when he added that good people had to stand up to evil in the world or it would continue to be perpetuated.
“She sniffled a couple more times and then the dam broke,” he said. “When she started talking, she couldn’t stop. You’re going to love what she has to say. I’m making arrangements to get her back to Manhattan and over to your office tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Clay, get some sleep and I’ll see you later today.” He hung up the telephone and stood up. He could use some sleep himself. It was probably going to be in short supply in the days ahead.