Robert Tanenbaum - Counterplay

Four days after the bombing at Brighton Beach Jaxon turned his field glasses on the SWAT teams making their way toward the mansion, dashing from one place of cover to the next. One team had already reached the guesthouse but reported it empty. Agent Hodges had confirmed Marlene’s information; he’d seen Kane in the house within the past week.

Speak of the devil, he thought as he looked behind him and saw Hodges trotting down the gravel road away from the house. Jon Ellis swore by the guy, but there was something about him that Jaxon didn’t like. It went beyond the Southern accent that he obviously laid on a little thicker whenever he was around Marlene or her daughter, Lucy, who’d driven up from New Mexico with her boyfriend. The guy’s just a little too slick, he thought. Maybe that came with the territory of being a deep plant; maybe you had to have a plastic, malleable personality to fit into whatever situation arose, but Hodges seemed to think this was all something of an amusing game.

The object of Jaxon’s inner debate continued jogging down the road. Agent Vic Hodges, aka Andrew Kane, found that he enjoyed keeping in “fighting trim” and took daily runs, which seemed to help him think more clearly.

It also seemed to help with his migraines. The headaches were nothing new-he’d had them off and on since puberty-but they’d been increasing in number and severity since his arrest the previous fall.

Kane giggled as he thought about the headlines in the Aspen Times back in June when the body of noted Aspen plastic surgeon Andre Buchwald had been found in his Mercedes off a mountain road. The body, according to the newspaper, was badly decomposed, but the good doctor had apparently been stabbed to death. The town worthies speculated that Buchwald must have picked up a hitchhiker who wasn’t quite “all there.” A side story noted that serial killer Ted Bundy had once been a prisoner of the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office until he escaped by jumping out of a second-floor window of the local courthouse.

Wait a little longer and they’re really going to have something to talk about, Kane thought and laughed out loud as he ran past the mailbox next to the long driveway leading up to Prince Bandar’s house. He wondered how the prince was faring. Bet he never thought that he’d end up a hostage of al Qaeda…not a pleasant prospect for him or his pathetic little family.

The arrival of the federal agents had caught Kane by surprise and would have messed up his plans if he hadn’t received a warning. Somehow that fucking bitch Marlene Ciampi had figured out where he was hiding. Probably those fucking Karchovskis, he thought. Should have killed them sooner…after that idiot Boris told me about the photograph of Azzam.

All such photographs were supposed to have been purged from federal files, yet one had suddenly appeared in the hands of some grubby Russian gangsters. It had become much more dangerous for Azzam to walk the streets, especially after Karp made copies and had them distributed to the police and federal agencies.

The Russians were proving to be a bigger thorn in his side than he’d anticipated. It had taken many years, but Kane had managed to find someone he could compromise close to the inner circles of most of the big gangs in the Greater New York area. Mostly, these people were kept on “retainers” to feed him information on their employers’ business interests, weaknesses, and peccadilloes. Humorously, Boris Nabakov had a weakness for young girls, but it was an expensive habit, so he’d agreed to spy on the Karchovskis for him. He’d been pretty much worthless until the day he’d called to report that the Karchovskis had a photograph of Samira Azzam, and…oh it’s almost too delicious to contemplate…had given them to their relative, Roger “Butch” Karp. The frickin’ Boy Scout of the NYDAO was related to a member of the Russian mob! Kane had yet to decide how best to use that information. But he just knew he’d find a way to work it into his vengeance.

For the most part, the plan had been a thing of beauty. The death of the Indian cop was wonderful. He had been afraid of the man, who’d shown up out of nowhere…a fucking third world Indian reservation for God’s sake…like some sort of avenging angel. His death had been almost too good to believe. But his spies had reported that the Indian had been given some elaborate funeral ceremony, full of wailing and superstitious nonsense; then he’d had the Ciampi woman followed, but again his spies told him that her grief was real-that she’d actually been seen on a park bench near her home and then again on the Coney Island boardwalk in tears. He didn’t understand such emotional reactions to somebody else’s death. He wasn’t even a lover, he thought. Women are such idiots.

The cowboy, too, though perhaps due to his age and relative inexperience, was not quite as dangerous, and therefore, Kane had not been as disappointed that he lived.

Kane had hoped that the teams sent to Taos would also abduct Lucy Karp. They’d been under orders to spirit her out of the country through the Mexican border and take her to his future home. He’d spent many evenings fantasizing about raping and torturing her while it was all being filmed to send back to her parents-if they somehow survived the coming days. However, there would be other opportunities to capture Lucy Karp.

Some of the plan was purely revenge motivated. However, he wasn’t so blinded by vengeance that it overrode his other motives. Fey died because he’d proven to be a traitor, but also there was a small possibility that under questioning he might unknowingly give the authorities a clue as to the major focus of the plan. The same with Flanagan. Of course, his intent had been to distract Karp and his wife, as well as the federal agencies, from the real purpose of his plan. It was the larger plan that interested Samira Azzam and al Qaeda.

Kane turned around and headed back up the road. The assault on the mansion was scheduled for dusk, and he wanted to catch it all as Agent Vic Hodges.

It had taken some balls to suddenly “come in from the cold,” so to speak, and try out his disguise on the others. So far it had worked perfectly, even Marlene Ciampi, whom he’d met before, didn’t show any sign that she recognized him.

The only one he worried about was Lucy, and they’d never even met face-to-face before this little soiree. But he’d caught her looking at him with a frown on her face several times in the past couple of days, as if she suspected something. He’d even wondered if he’d made a mistake not to have the assassination teams try to kill her along with the Indian and the cowboy.

Speak of the devil, he thought as he looked ahead and saw Lucy standing near the mailbox at the bottom of the mansion driveway. “Going to check the mail?” he smiled as he trotted up to her, laying the Southern accent on thick.

“What? No,” Lucy answered as if he’d caught her daydreaming. “Mind if I ask you something?”

Kane gave her his best smile. “Not at all.”

“What’s with the phony Southern accent?” she asked.

Kane’s heart froze. Kill her, a little voice in his head yelled. Quiet you, we’d be caught, he replied. “Phony?”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s sort of hodgepodge of Mississippi Delta, Arkansas hillbilly, and Virginia plantation owner. Not bad. You have a gift for mimicry, and most people wouldn’t notice. But I have an ear for these things.”

Better kill her, the voice said.

“Caught me,” he conceded. “I was actually raised on the East Coast, but my family was Army and we moved around the South a lot, too. Then I had to sort of become a ‘redneck’ to fit in with the Aryan Brotherhood, so to tell you the truth, I’m not surprised I’m a potpourri of dialects.”