Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

"Clay? You can't have Clay, not with Tran in the room."

"Why not?"

"Because Tran's got a fugitive warrant on him. He shot all those people out on Long Beach. Which Clay knows about."

"Yes, and he shot those people in the course of saving your daughter's life. It's not like he was a drug baron or a serial killer."

"He is a serial killer, and he might be a drug baron, for all we know. And our guest list is a little peculiar. This wouldn't be a working party, would it?"

"Wine and cheese," said Marlene, "sober discussion about your problem. Your problem, remember? I assume you still want it solved."

"Not that way. Not using gangsters. And Clay will walk out, and I'll lose a friend. Shit! I hate this!"

"I know you do, but you have to trust me. Look, if I wanted to know about some arcane point of criminal law, say the definition of conspiracy in New York v. Patterson, who would I turn to, hm?"

"Patterson has nothing to do with conspiracy. It says that the state may refuse to sustain the affirmative defense of insanity unless demonstrated by a preponderance of the evidence."

"See! I defer to your greater knowledge. In the same way, if you want to pull off a surreptitious investigation involving deception, chicanery, and a casual attitude toward the law, who would you turn to?"

Karp said nothing. She tickled him in the ribs. "Come on, Butch! You know I'm the man when it comes to the gray areas."

He sighed. He was so far gone in vice, he thought, that another increment could hardly damn him deeper. Besides, and not inconsiderable in itself, his wife was back. Real Marlene was sitting on his lap, her eye sparkling with the old light. It was worth losing a chunk of soul for. "Oh, all right!" he snapped. "Have your damn party."

"Good!" she said, and cuddled closer. "Now, where were we when the dog howled?"

At which point they heard the elevator crank up, and they sighed and rolled their eyes and felt each other up in a friendly way, and shortly after in came the prodigal daughter, alone. She, after greeting her parents warmly, and after a mutual exchange of apologies, went to the refrigerator and peered in. "I could kill for a corned beef sandwich on rye," she exclaimed, which, oddly enough, made Karp feel better than he had for a while: she was not entirely lost to the Orient, it appeared. This item was prepared, and she ate it, and they had a reunion. After a while Karp picked up the vibes telling him that the two of them wanted some time by themselves. This he was glad to give, for though he was a devout father and uxorious to the point of absurdity, given the typical mores of last-century New York, there was stuff, some weird gynospecific energy, that passed between the two chief females in his life that he did not care to be around. He went off to watch television.

"Where's Tran?" Marlene asked when he was gone. "I thought he was going to stay with us."

"He has a place on Bayard he stays in. Business associates, ha ha. He thinks Dad doesn't like him."

"It's my house, too."

"Yeah, well, he's not a sensitive, liberated New Age man. What can I say? He would probably deal direct with Dad and cut you out entirely as far as I was concerned except he's embarrassed about his English. Boy, but he's a good teacher!"

"Determined. I was saying the same to your father."

"Yes, but not just that. He just knows how to light something up, so you say. Oh, God, how could I have been so dumb not to see it! And he doesn't make you feel bad, except in that funny shtick he does about you're totally worthless and should be drowned so there'll be more rice for everyone else. It's so sad. That must be the saddest thing in the world-someone finds their metier, the only thing in the world they really want to do, and they're really good at it, too, but for one reason or another they don't get to do it."

"I don't know. People do what comes along, more or less. Your dad wanted to be a basketball player, but he's pretty happy as a prosecutor."

"But he's not a prosecutor," said Lucy vehemently. "That's my point. He's good at prosecuting cases, but they won't let him. He pushes paper and bureaucratizes. He hates it." Lucy looked closely at her mother. "And how about you, Mom? Still enjoying the ill-gotten gains?"

Marlene could not help a start at this comment. "Why 'ill-gotten'?"

"Oh, just a figure of speech. I guess they're not gotten too ill, in comparison."

"Actually," Marlene said after a considered pause, "they are. Wait here: I want you to help me with something. It's very important. Speaking of metier."

She left and returned a moment later carrying her Sony microrecorder. "Okay, here's the deal. You'll recall that two days before our IPO came out, your pal and mine, Oleg Sirmenkov, and a team of God knows what kind of hard boys he dug up, hit a farmhouse in Kosovo and rescued Dick Perry and his party from the grip of Serbian kidnappers. All the good guys were unharmed, and all the bad guys were killed in the assault, including two women. Osborne was all over every network in the world-you remember those shots with Perry getting out of the car with those big guys in black jumpsuits with Osborne plastered across their backs?"

"Yeah, they played it like continuously. What about it?"

"Just that a couple of days before the kidnapping, Oleg was walking around the office like the cat that ate the canary. Everyone else was gritting their teeth about the offering, but not Oleg. He was confident it would fly to the moon. And, of course, it did. I asked him why he was so up on it, and he said something to the effect that events would be in our favor."

Lucy looked puzzled. "So… you think he knew about the kidnapping before it happened? Then why didn't he stop it?"

"Why indeed? It's been bugging me for weeks. Also, it was only four days from the time they snatched Perry off a street in Pristina until Oleg's people sprang him, with half of NATO beating the bushes looking, with no result."

"What, you think he set it up? Kidnapped his own client?"

"No, but I think he knew the snatch was going down, and he let it happen. Dropped an agent into a Serbian extremist cell maybe. He had his rescue team all primed, he must have had the location and layout of the farmhouse before he went in. There's no other way he could've done that operation the way it went down, to pull out four people without injury, and kill eleven kidnappers. Oleg's good, but not that good. And all the bad guys dead, by the way, that's significant, too. No tales afterwards."

"But that's horrible!"

"Yeah. And the more I tried not to think about it, the worse it got. Drunk as I was, I couldn't get it out of my mind. That business with Kelsie, that was just the last straw." Marlene let out a large sigh. "Anyway, I lifted all the international-call recordings-all the calls to Russia or Pristina for the relevant time period I mean-off his computer and decrypted them." She tapped the tape recorder. "I played them out onto tape. They're in Russian, of course. I could go to a commercial translation service, but who knows what Oleg's contacts are in the local Russian community? I'd like you to listen to them and make me a transcript."

Lucy stared at the thin tape recorder with a peculiar expression on her face-repugnance mixed with fascinated delight. "Sure. When do you want it?"

"Now. As soon as possible. I'm not enough of a computer jockey to hide my traces. If Oleg's got some kind of snooper program on his machine, which he's bound to, being Oleg, he'll know someone was in his files. And it won't take him long to figure out who it was. I want to go in there Monday all loaded and ready to kick butt."

"What're you going to do?"

"I don't know exactly. Something nasty and unreasonable, I guess."

Lucy smiled at her mother. "This is your metier, isn't it?"