Robert Tanenbaum - Bad Faith

“Yeah, and I’m worried about what she’s really got planned in that twisted mind,” Capers replied. “I have a hard time envisioning her settling down in some small obscure town in the Midwest and joining the local Junior League, all under the watchful eye of my office. That’s a leap too far if you get my drift.”

“I do,” Jaxon said. “But I feel safer knowing that you’re itching to put a bullet in her if she so much as blinks in the wrong direction.”

Capers nodded. “I wouldn’t mind.”

Jaxon smiled. “I rather enjoyed playing the old married couple in line this morning,” he said.

Capers returned the smile. “Yeah, something I could get used to,” she said, and then sighed. “Of course, a girl would have to be asked first.”

When she saw his expression change, she laughed again and said with a light drawl she’d picked up in her hometown of Austin, Texas, “Why bless your heart, Agent Espey Jaxon, you’re as red as a chili pepper. I do believe you’re feeling a tad backed into a corner?”

“No, I … um … well,” Jaxon stammered. “I just wasn’t expecting-”

Capers laughed again. “Don’t worry. You’re off the hook … for now. I’ll let you go back to capturing terrorists while I check on my prisoner and hope she tries to escape.”

“We still on for dinner at Butch and Marlene’s place tomorrow night?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for all the oil in Texas,” Capers replied.

As she disappeared back inside the ferry, Jaxon glanced over at where Ned Blanchett lay prone on the deck, looking through the scope of his sniper rifle at the terrorists on the other boat. A few feet beyond him, Lucy Karp and several NIDSA agents hovered around communication equipment set up for negotiating with the terrorists on the boat.

Lucy looked up as he approached and shook her head. Jaxon looked at his watch: 8:50. The terrorists had until nine to surrender or face attack.

He had insisted that his agency be in charge of this operation while the NIDSA agents took a backseat. Jaxon’s argument was that Malovo was vital to his agency’s attempts to root out the remaining members of the Sons of Man and should stay his prisoner. Under normal circumstances, a bigger national security group like NIDSA would have laughed and taken over. But the powerful man who had formed Jaxon’s agency in secrecy and asked him to run it carried a lot of weight in the nation’s capital, and his team leader got what he wanted in this case.

After complaining vigorously, the chief agent for NIDSA gave in but insisted that his man be the liaison between Malovo and Jaxon’s agency. He had no choice but to agree; the assassin would only talk to the agent. Other agents with several agencies had tried to interrogate her after her arrest, but it wasn’t until the current macho man came along that she agreed to make a deal. Exactly what it was wasn’t clear, but it started with her not spending the rest of her life in FloMax, the maximum-security federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, that housed the worst of the worst, including the Blind Sheik and the Unabomber.

So Jaxon had to rely on the agent to pass on any information that was pertinent to the Sons of Man. Occasionally, Jaxon was allowed to question Malovo in the presence of the NIDSA agent about information she had provided. But most of what he learned was relayed in briefings.

Currently, she wasn’t divulging much about the Sons of Man. She’d diverted the focus to a series of terrorist plots aimed at the New York metropolitan area that she said her sources had told her were in the works. The sources believed that she was her alter ego, Ajmaani, a Chechen Muslim terrorist, and she’d used that to infiltrate the sleeper cells to find out their plans.

It was how they’d learned about the impending attack on the ferry. She said she’d been told that two men would board the ferry and wait until the boat was leaving Ellis Island before signaling to their comrades waiting in another boat and then commandeering the lightly guarded vessel using weapons they believed had been stashed aboard by an accomplice. Once the boat was in their control, they would order it stopped in the waters just off Liberty Island. They would then blow it up with everyone on it, including themselves and every man, woman, and child.

“For propaganda purposes,” Malovo had explained.

Thanks to Malovo’s information, they’d been able to identify Ghilzai and Akhund; knew where the accomplice (who’d since been arrested) had hidden the weapons, which had been exchanged for harmless fakes; and were waiting for Ghilzai to pass the word to proceed to the others when the ferry started to leave the dock.

Originally, they had considered remaining on the regular ferry and continuing with the journey, inviting attack even with the tourists aboard, so that the waiting terrorists would not note anything amiss. But there was too much of a risk that the attackers might get through the first line of defense and hurt or kill an innocent adult or child. So they’d come up with the idea of switching ferries, bringing the second ferry with the armed agents over in the middle of the night.

Malovo knew that the main terrorist group would be approaching the ferry from the water, but she said she wasn’t sure of the boat they would be using as they planned to steal one in the night. And that was a source of concern. On any given day in the spring, New York Harbor was jumping with watercraft, from oceangoing freighters and Hudson River barges to cabin cruisers, yachts, and small sailboats. The feds would have to let some of them approach close enough to be sure they were the enemy or risk tipping the terrorists off and allowing them to escape to plan some other attack.

It was the reason Malovo had been brought along for the ride. She would make her appearance from the pilothouse and then go back inside once the attackers had revealed themselves. And indeed that’s what happened.

When they reached the waters off Liberty Island in front of the statue, Malovo walked out of the pilothouse and the captain shut his engines down as if he was following the instructions of Ghilzai. That’s when a large cabin cruiser that had been in with the other boat traffic suddenly veered toward them.

Jaxon had waited for the terrorists’ boat to separate from the vessels around them and move to within a few hundred yards, then gave the word. Suddenly, a half-dozen New York Police Department speedboats and a U.S. Coast Guard gunboat with a fifty-caliber machine gun mounted on the bow materialized seemingly out of nowhere. The gunboat swerved into the path of the cabin cruiser; the terrorists tried to escape, but they were cut off by the NYPD craft surrounding them. At the same time, two dozen federal agents from Jaxon’s office and NIDSA transformed from supposed tourists milling about on deck to armed men ready to repel boarders. They were then joined by an NYPD helicopter with a sharpshooter perched in the open side door.

Surrounded, the terrorists had fired a few shots before cutting their engines and stopping in the water. After a half hour, they’d agreed to talk, and a small rubber dinghy had been launched from the gunboat with a cell phone. Apparently, the group was split on how to proceed; some of them wanted to surrender, but others-apparently foreigners, as they spoke to Lucy in Arabic and Urdu-refused. They’d been told they had until nine, which was now only a few minutes away.

“Something’s happening!” Blanchett shouted.

The din of two dozen men and women carrying on a variety of conversations stopped the moment Karp walked into the conference room and took his seat at the head of the long table for the weekly Monday morning bureau chiefs meeting. On either side of him, the New York DAO’s chiefs and assistant chiefs, and a smattering of assistant district attorneys, waited expectantly, some sitting at the table, others occupying whatever seat they could find around the room.