“YOU MIGHT AS WELL CALL OFF THE POLICE, KARP. YOUR friends will be dead before they arrive, and I will be gone. But I wanted you to know that soon it will be your sons and daughter and then your bitch wife you will be mourning. And only then will I come for you.”
Nadya Malovo flipped Moishe Sobelman’s cell phone shut and laughed. Her main objective was accomplished—the death of Dean Newbury. All it had taken was a couple of tablespoons of powdered aconite root placed in the water pitcher she’d watched Karp use throughout the trial.
It had been risky staying in the courtroom while Newbury testified that morning. She’d met the old man on several previous occasions, and there was the chance he’d recognize her. The same reason she’d stayed away on the day the Indian, Jojola, took the stand. But he was younger, sharper, and a lot more dangerous than Newbury.
The disguise as Natalie Stiefelmaier, the dowdy, middle-aged paralegal, was a good one, although the extra padding in the support hose and around her hips, buttocks, and breasts was uncomfortably warm. It did its job, however. Early on, starting with some of the pretrial hearings, it got her through the shorter, less intensive court-personnel security line with O’Dowd and Elijah. By the time the trial got under way, the guards were used to seeing her come and go, though Karp’s men still kept them on their toes for weapons and strange packages.
Malovo was also counting on the way most men looked at women. Even old men like Newbury would hone in on an attractive blond woman like heat-seeking missiles, but a plain, overweight spinster was just background noise. Her prey never noticed her sitting behind the defense table, which he avoided looking at most of the time anyway.
Unable to locate Newbury in the months before the trial, she’d hoped to take him out as he was being transported. But Detective Fulton had kept the security detail small so that there’d be no leaks about when he was being moved and by what routes. So she’d moved on to the idea of getting some suicidal idiot to drive a panel truck in front of the court building and ignite a fertilizer-fuel bomb, as Timothy McVeigh had done to the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. But one look at the solid, looming edifice that occupied 100 Centre Street, and she knew that it would withstand a fairly major blast, and there was no guarantee that Newbury would be killed. And the Sons of Man had made it very clear that they expected her to succeed this time, or they would find someone else.
No, she was going to have to get as close to Newbury as she did with Congressman Denton Crawford, and that meant getting him into the courtroom. The first step had been a call from the Varick Detention Center to Karp’s office, pretending to be an anonymous federal agent with a tip about Jabbar being moved. After that, it was not difficult to talk Megan O’Dowd into going along with the plan for “paralegal” Stiefelmaier to accompany her, as well as to ensure that Newbury testified—opposing his appearance but only enough to avoid raising suspicions.
The defense attorney considered it a win-win situation. She was tired of taking on political cases with little to show for it except a diminishing reputation as an activist lawyer, and the Sons of Man were going to make her wealthy. She would also get her revenge on Karp, a man she hated as much as Malovo did.
Still, even with O’Dowd’s cooperation, it was no easy task to accomplish the assassination. The assumed identity got her into the courtroom, but she wasn’t going to be able to smuggle a bomb or a gun. Nor was she willing to commit suicide to kill Newbury; she needed an exit strategy that would provide for her own escape.
The idea of how to make it all work had come from watching Karp pour water for witnesses, his co-counsel, and himself. Once he’d even poured a cup for Megan O’Dowd, who’d glared at him with her back to the jury but accepted the drink rather than make a scene in front of them.
It was easy enough to get the small packet of powdered aconite root past the metal detectors and bomb-detection dogs. The question had been whether Newbury would drink on the witness stand, and that’s why she’d chanced attending to watch Karp’s questioning. She’d been pleased to note that Newbury frequently sipped water on the stand. She knew he would do the same thing when O’Dowd questioned him after lunch.
The plan was nearly foiled when Karp returned from the break early and almost caught her pouring the packet into the water pitcher. She’d heard him greet the guard at the door just in time to grab one of the defense folders, so that she would have an excuse for being on that side of the bar.
Then there’d been another close call when she saw Jojola and a woman approaching the front of the Criminal Courts Building. Recognizing the woman as the U.S. marshal she’d shot in Colorado, she’d quickly ducked into the nearest cab and hoped she hadn’t been spotted. As soon as the cab pulled away, though, she’d relaxed and laughed as she stripped out of her “fat suit.”
“You okay, lady?” the cab driver had asked, glancing in his rearview mirror and obviously wondering what kinky event was going on as his new fare took off her clothes in the back of his vehicle.
“Yes, all part of a Broadway production,” she’d said with a coy smile, which satisfied the cabbie, who kept watching her finish dressing in a blouse and jeans, amazed at the transformation from plain to gorgeous.
As the taxi had made its way uptown toward Twenty-ninth Street and Il Buon Pane, Malovo had laughed out loud at the delicious irony of Karp becoming her “accomplice” by pouring the fatal cup of water for Dean Newbury. She’d been dropping hints purposely throughout the trial. She’d even brought the cherry-cheese coffee cake from Il Buon Pane into the courtroom hoping he would notice. It was an unnecessary risk, but she wanted Karp to know that she’d been sitting there right under his nose the whole time, plotting her revenge. And he would know without a doubt that there was nothing he could do to prevent her from making good on her promise to kill him and his family.
She imagined Newbury wrinkling his nose at the slightly bitter aftertaste of the poisoned water. But he’d quickly forget about that as he began to experience a severe shortness of breath and constriction of his airway, followed by pain and tightness in his chest. He might wonder if he was having a heart attack—and indeed, the “Queen of Poisons” over the centuries had often gone undetected as anything but death from natural causes. No amount of resuscitation effort would save him.
Of course, Sharif Jabbar was going to be disappointed in the actual outcome. O’Dowd had been led to believe, and passed on to her client, that “Natalie” would assassinate both Newbury and Karp. With the district attorney dead, the judge would be forced to declare a mistrial, and powerful people within the federal government could then insist that Jabbar be turned over to them. And, according to what O’Dowd was told, the original deal to ship him off to the Saudis would be back on.
However, while there was the chance that Karp would drink the water—something she had not seen him do during the trial so far—the Sons of Man were paying her to kill Crawford and Newbury. Unless Karp happened to die, too, Jabbar would be on his own to beat the charges. If he won, he’d be off to Saudi Arabia; if he lost, the plan was to make sure he didn’t survive his first month in the penitentiary.
Malovo had actually hoped Karp wouldn’t drink the poison, because she wanted to kill everything he loved before she came for him. And she would start with the old couple who owned the bakery. She’d learned of their existence, and their place in Karp’s life, by following him. She’d seen him on his weekly visits and saw how they greeted him like a long-lost son and he returned the affection as if they were his parents.
A rare twinge of guilt had nagged at Malovo as she visited the bakery to learn the couple’s routines. The old man, Moishe, she could not have cared less about; she didn’t like Jews, and killing him wasn’t going to trouble her. However, the old woman, Goldie, had been extraordinarily kind, even if she spoke with her hands and her actions rather than words. Malovo had even considered just killing the husband, but she knew it would be the death of the woman that would eat at Karp, who would know that he’d led his enemy to them. And in her own admittedly twisted way, she also thought it would be cruel to murder one and not the other.
So she’d resolved to kill them both and let Karp absorb the guilt. On the way to the bakery, she’d called her accomplice, a muscle-bound idiot the Sons of Man had provided for her, and told him to move ahead with the plan. As a result, when she’d reached Il Buon Pane, he was standing guard near the door with his gun trained on Moishe, who stood with his hands in the air behind the counter, trying to shield his wife.
Malovo had just walked up to the old man when the cell phone in his top apron pocket began to ring. She’d reached over the counter and plucked it out, smiling when she read the caller ID. “It’s your friend, the district attorney,” she’d said, handing the phone back. “Answer it. Then let me talk.”
Moishe had done as he was told. “Hello, Butch,” he’d said, and then added, “Butch, she is already here. She wants to speak to you.”
After hanging up with Karp, she flipped the cell phone shut and laughed. She was going to be a wealthy woman. Now it was time to begin her revenge. She stepped back from the counter and nodded to her accomplice, who leveled his gun at Moishe.
Two things happened next, neither of which Malovo had counted on. The first was Goldie Sobelman screaming, “Nooooo!” The only word she’d ever heard the old woman say. The second was the ear-shattering roar of the .45-caliber pistol that had appeared in Goldie’s hand, the bullet from which caught the would-be executioner in the chest, knocking him backward into a table as customers screamed and panicked.
Malovo didn’t panic. Instead, she dove for the gun her partner had dropped and rolled back to her feet with the sights now trained on Goldie, who was trying to hold her own gun steady.
The two women stood looking at each other over the barrels of their guns. Then Goldie placed hers on the counter and raised her hands. “Please, child,” she said, her voice hardly more than a whisper from self-imposed silence. “If you must shoot, then I beg you, me first. I cannot stand to see him hurt.”
“Goldie, no!” Moishe cried. He picked up a baker’s knife and raised it above his head as if to threaten the assassin. “Shoot me, but spare her!”
Nadya Malovo moved the gun from Moishe and back to Goldie. Her finger had begun to exert pressure when, for the first time in years beyond which she could remember, a voice from deep within stopped her. She lowered the gun and stood still, her eyes locked on Goldie’s.
The front door of the bakery was flung open. “Drop the gun,” U.S. Marshal Jen Capers shouted as she entered, her gun aimed at Malovo’s head.
For a moment, Malovo considered whirling and shooting the marshal. She knew she stood a good chance of winning the duel. But Goldie shook her head slightly and smiled. The gun clattered to the ground as she returned the smile and raised her hands in the air. She turned to face Capers. “Shoot—get it over with,” she said.
Capers shook her head. “Not today, dang it. Today you live.”