Robert Tanenbaum - Bad Faith

When his comments were challenged by an editorial writer the next day, Westlund backtracked. He complained that his remarks had been “taken out of context” when aired on the evening news. By “predecessors,” he said, he’d meant other district attorneys and law officers, not Jews. And his reference to crucifying, he added, was just a metaphor to illustrate how the Ellises were being “unfairly and harshly” treated for their spiritual beliefs.

As the trial date neared, Westlund was savvy enough to let his followers make the most inflammatory comments, up to and including that the DAO was prosecuting the Ellises solely because Karp was an evil Jew who hated Christians. Occasionally when one of his followers stepped over the line enough for the media to raise their collective eyebrows, Westlund would issue a press release through his church saying that he did not “condone hate speech.” He attributed the venal comments to “a few overwrought church members who are reacting to the district attorney’s attack on the fundamental American right to practice religion without the interference of the government. It may have been an inappropriate way to express their feelings, but I think what you’re seeing is their frustration as yet another one of their God-given rights is taken from them.”

As Karp’s reflection continued, he was reminded that Westlund and his ilk weren’t the only ones using God’s name in vain to further their hateful personal agendas. But his thoughts were interrupted when his receptionist announced the arrival of Murrow, who stuck his head in the door. “Ready, boss?” he asked, referring to the bureau chiefs meeting.

“Yeah, let’s go,” Karp replied, wondering how this day that had begun so full of beauty would end.

Espey Jaxon looked up from the deck of the ferry, saw the news helicopter circling in the distance, and then noticed Nadya Malovo out of the corner of his eye. She’d come out from the interior of the boat with Agent Mike Rolles, her National Inter-Departmental Security Administration handler, and walked over to stand beside him. She looked across the water at the motorboat filled with armed men that stood motionless in the water.

“I thought the idea was to keep her out of sight,” Jaxon said to Agent Rolles with a frown.

Before the agent could answer, U.S. Marshal Jen Capers emerged from the ferry and strode up to where the three stood. “It was,” she answered angrily. She pointed her finger at the agent and said, “This violates the agreement.”

“Relax,” Rolles said with a smirk. He reminded Jaxon of a college fraternity type playing at secret agent. “What’s she going to do, swim for it? She’s cuffed, and she’s with me. She just wanted to watch, and after all, she’s the reason Ali Baba and the Forty Terrorists on that boat over there are screwed. Or would you have rather watched this ferry and a few hundred tourists get incinerated on the news tonight?”

“She couldn’t care less about innocent people dying,” Capers spat, fixing Malovo with a hard stare. “She’s looking out for herself. Now she goes inside, or I’ll haul her sociopathic rear end back to that nice little cell we have for her at FloMax penitentiary. She’s still a prisoner of the U.S. Marshals Service.”

“Afraid national security trumps your little escort service,” the agent said scathingly.

“Yeah?” Capers replied, pulling out her cell phone and holding it up to him. “You want to explain to your boss and mine what your playing Pinocchio to her Geppetto has to do with national security? Maybe she’s yanking your strings, or something else, a bit too much and you need to be cut loose. Now, what’s it going to be? You want to make the call or should I?”

Rolles’s smirk dissolved into an angry glare and his face flushed. But then he turned to Malovo and nodded toward the door. “Go inside,” he snapped.

“Yes, of course,” Malovo replied in heavily accented English. She looked up at the news helicopter hovering in the distance and smiled at Capers. “I’ll leave you with your boyfriend and watch the festivities with someone who appreciates my … contributions. Such fire in a woman … a shame you only like men.”

Capers ignored the comment and signaled to a young marshal standing close to the ferry door. “Hank, escort the prisoner back inside,” she said, “and this time if she moves from where I told her to stay, cuff her to the rail.”

Hank Masterson, a former Navy SEAL and prior to that a college linebacker, nodded. “Yes, ma’am. And if Double-oh-seven has a problem with it, should I cuff him, too?”

Rolles bristled. “You want to go, big boy, let me know,” he shot back, but turned away when Masterson just laughed at him.

When the others were inside, Capers looked at Jaxon. “Sorry about that,” she said. “I had to call in to headquarters and couldn’t get any reception inside the ferry. Hank was supposed to stay with her but Rolles convinced him to wait for me. Good man, Hank, but he’s still learning.”

“Not a problem,” Jaxon replied as he smiled and then turned back to study the idling motorboat through his binoculars. “And it was worth listening to you cut that jackass down to size with the Pinocchio comment-‘yanking your strings, or something else,’ that’s classic. Still, I have to admit, I’m glad she tipped us off on this one.”

Capers didn’t respond to his last comment and he knew why. A year ago, Malovo had posed as the legal assistant of a lawyer who was helping defend a terrorist, the imam Jabbar, in a trial Karp was prosecuting. She poisoned a former leader of the Sons of Man as he was about to testify about his secret society’s role in aiding the defendant in an attack on the New York Stock Exchange. Malovo had then escaped from the courtroom and made her way to Il Buon Pane bakery, where she intended to murder the owner, Moishe Sobelman, just to torment her nemesis Butch Karp, who had befriended the old man. But Moishe’s wife, Goldie, had somehow made her hesitate, and then Capers arrived at the shop and got the drop on her.

It had taken every ounce of her professionalism for Capers not to pull the trigger and arrest her instead. Just a few months earlier, Malovo had led an attack that killed Capers’s partner. It rankled Capers that she now had to play babysitter for Malovo, who’d worked out some sort of deal with the NIDSA higher-ups in which she supplied information on radical Islamic sleeper cells.

“The powers that be decided we don’t need to know all of what she’s getting in exchange,” Capers told Jaxon one evening when they were discussing the arrangement over dinner. “We just know she’ll be going into WITSEC; but what else she gets, your guess is as good as mine, and for some reason it’s a big secret.”

Jaxon now grimaced remembering the conversation and Capers’s distress that instead of languishing in a tiny isolation cell with a shoebox-sized window for light twenty-three hours a day-or receiving the death penalty-her enemy would be placed in WITSEC, the federal witness protection program. There Malovo would, at the very least, be given a new identity, a place to live, and money to live on, and, most galling of all, the U.S. Marshals Service would be responsible for her safety.

“I’m sorry, querida ,” he said now, using his pet name for her as no one was close enough to hear. “It’s just wrong. No matter what she gives us now, it doesn’t absolve her of the evil she’s done.”

Capers patted him lightly on the shoulder. “Don’t sweat it, pumpkin,” she replied. “My partner would have gladly given his life to save innocent people, even if it required our making a deal with the devil.”

“A she-devil,” Jaxon said, turning from the rail to face her.