Robert Tanenbaum: Malice

"You said to wait until he saw the photographs and admitted to the murders," Jaxon said with a smile. "I had him in my sights the whole time."

Karp shook his head. That afternoon, when he met with Jaxon and explained the plan, the agent asked, "Why not me?"

"What do you mean?"

"Why don't you think I'm the traitor, Jamys Kellagh?" Jaxon said. "Lucy does. There are plenty of good reasons to think it could be."

"And don't think I haven't considered them," Karp said with a smirk. "But there are a few better reasons why I know it wasn't you."

"Such as?"

"Well, let's start with Stupenagel's stories," Karp said. "I'll bet you're the anonymous government source who's been leaking her the information."

"Damn straight."

"Uh-huh," Karp said, then laughed. "It's probably something you don't even think about, but you've been saying 'Damn straight' ever since I've known you."

"So?"

"So Stupenagel is pretty good at quoting people verbatim," Karp said. "I noticed in three of her stories that the 'anonymous government source' kept ending his quotes by saying 'Damn straight.'"

"Pretty flimsy," Jaxon pointed out.

"On its own, maybe," Karp acknowledged. "But I also asked Clay to get me the tapes of the attempted assassination of Senator Tom McCullum from Channel Nine. They almost didn't let him have them, kept saying they wouldn't release anything that hadn't been shown on television, and even then only if they got subpoenaed. But Clay placed a call to the traffic division and started to tell them about all the illegally parked cars outside the station, and suddenly he had a tape."

"Again, my question, so what?"

"So Clay and I watched them a couple of dozen times, and we noticed something," Karp said. "When the shooting started, Ellis just stood to the side and watched McCullum, as if he expected him to get shot. But one 'former' FBI agent, named Espey Jaxon, jumped in front of the archbishop-the man he was supposed to protect-and it was one of your men who charged the gunman. Not exactly the behavior of co-conspirators."

"Anything else?"

Karp nodded. "Yeah. I think I'm a pretty good judge of character. I knew that murdering children was not part of who you were. Oh, and by the way, it was Lucy who suggested that we watch the tapes. She's a pretty good judge of character, too."

It took a moment for Jaxon to respond to the last statement. He swallowed hard and said hoarsely, "I think I better call my 'niece' the next time I'm in New Mexico and take her out to lunch."

Karp smiled. "If I'd had any other doubts, you just answered them."

A groan escaped Ellis, who was gradually coming around. Jaxon nodded to his men who had patted the agent down and cuffed him. "Glad we could take this asshole alive. The federal government's going to try to claim jurisdiction, you know."

"Been through that fight once recently," Karp said. "They'll have to wait for justice New York DAO style."

Ellis was brought to his feet, still groggy from the fifty thousand watts of electricity that had coursed through his body from the Taser. He suddenly pitched forward as if stumbling and brought his hands to his mouth.

"Grab him! He just ate something," Jaxon shouted to his men. He jumped behind Ellis and began giving him the Heimlich maneuver to dislodge whatever the man had swallowed. "Get an ambulance! Now!"

"Don't bother," Ellis croaked. "Cyanide salts. I'll be dead before he can dial the number."

Ellis crumpled to the ground, breathing deeply but rapidly. A convulsion shook him, followed by another. "Others will follow me," he whispered, his jaw clenched in pain. "They will not fail. Myr shegin dy ve, bee eh."

Ellis vomited and was racked by more convulsions, then his body stiffened and went limp.

Karp reached down and picked up the envelope with the photographs of the murdered children. Tomorrow, he would place it in the evidence file that would be boxed and sent to storage. But he knew he would never forget their faces.

"I'm tired, Clay," he said as the big detective walked up. "I'm tired of all of this."

Fulton nodded, then patted him on the shoulder. "Me, too, boss," he said. "But tomorrow's another day, and it's time to take you home. Your lady's waiting, and so is mine."

Bill Florence raised a glass of orange juice and brandy to those sitting with him around the table outside Kitchenette. "The blood of patriots and tyrants," the old newspaperman toasted.

"To Vince Newbury and Cian Magee," Father Jim Sunderland added. "Let's not forget whose blood was spilled in the cause of liberty."

The artist, Geoff Gilbert, took a drink and sighed. "I miss those days at Julius's house when we were all so young, and Vince was still part of our little fraternity." He turned his face to the morning sun on a beautiful, cloudless day in April.

"We were fortunate that Vince remembered those days, and came to us when he began to suspect the true nature of the skeleton in his family closet," Judge Frank Plaut replied.

"He remembered the old oath we took," said clothier Saul Silverstein. "We believed in what the Founding Fathers worked so hard to create and swore to protect it with our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor."

"We were also young, full of whiskey and fresh out of law school or just going into business like you and Mr. Florence…or hanging out with the Beats, like our own Geoffrey Gilbert," Dennis Hall noted. "Hell, I didn't even have a year in yet with the U.S. Attorney General's Office, and I'm sure none of us had any idea that our little fraternal oath would end up getting us mixed up in something as big as this."

"I don't know about that," Murray Epstein, the defense attorney pointed out. "Julius Karp was pretty worried about how the ordinary citizen reacts when demagogues like McCarthy dredge up bogeymen in order to secure more power for themselves and the government. I remember him, a little tipsy on the front porch, quoting from Orwell's book, 1984…the part about how the government, Big Brother, used the lie about a false war being waged to keep people in line and stop them from questioning what the government was doing."

"Yes, I remember," Epstein went on. "He thought Ike was saying much the same thing when he warned about the military-industrial complex, an enemy within that could be more of a threat to the Constitution than the enemy without."

"But Islamic extremism isn't a fictional enemy, nor politically compatible with a Big Brother conspiracy…though one has to wonder now that we've learned something of the Sons of Man," Sunderland pointed out.

"Bullshit," Hall scoffed. "Islamic extremism is the much greater danger. It cannot be reasoned with. How do you reason with people who believe that God has told them what to do? In fact, God has given them orders to subjugate the world…they have to obey or go to hell. There's a war for our lives, not just our way of life, going on, and we have to be careful that we don't hamstring the government so much because we're inflexibile-which the Constitution was never meant to be-that we lose both our lives and way of life. We need to keep an eye on government-and beware of those who think like the Sons of Man-but not a foot. There are other books that were as foreboding as 1984…one of them was Mein Kampf. The current appeasers on the left, and the United Nations, could well place us in a position occupied by Neville Chamberlain just prior to World War Two. Now, there's the greater immediate danger."

"Spoken like a true Fox Network propagandist," the defense attorney Epstein scoffed at his friend the prosecutor.

"Oh, a fine thing to say for a CNN lackey," Hall shot back.

"Would you two quit fighting for a moment and tell me why," said Gilbert, "if we know that Dean Newbury is part of this 'evil empire,' we don't tell the FBI or somebody like that?"