Infamy (8 page)

Bryers shrugged. “It's none of my business anyway. What have you got there?”

Clare held up two plates, each with a sandwich. “Let's eat.”

“Sure, I've got to go use the bathroom real quick. Didn't want to pee in the pool.”

“Too much information.” Clare laughed. “Okay, be quick about it. And wash your hands!”

“Yes, ma'am,” Bryers said, walking into the house.

The hallway to the guest bathroom went past Constantine's library, where he'd once sat and talked about coaching the man's son. As he approached the room, he saw that the door was half open and heard Constantine's angry voice.

“I don't care what it takes!” He was apparently speaking to
someone on the telephone. “You get your ass down there and make sure that shit Mueller keeps his damn mouth shut. Tell him you'll represent him in court; say we'll get him off and double what he was being paid. . . . What's that? . . . Just say Moore was acting on his own and that we'll deal with him. Tell him whatever you need to, but make sure he keeps his damn mouth shut!”

Bryers froze. He didn't know what to think. Then Fitzsimmons spoke. “There's a call on the secure line. It's the White House. Want to take it?”

“Of course I'll take it, you moron,” Wellington answered, then apparently took the call. “Yeah, it's me.” He was quiet for a moment, then shouted, “Don't threaten me, you bitch. I put you and your boss where you are. We wouldn't be in this mess if he'd made sure those files got handed over to me right away. Who were those guys in Iraq? You don't know? You work for the most powerful man in the world and you don't know who was on that operation? Well, they almost fucked up MIRAGE, and it still might be, so I'd suggest you find out.”

Bryers was suddenly aware of footsteps approaching the door from inside the library. He knew he was about to get caught eavesdropping by Fitzsimmons, and the thought made him afraid. But instead, the door was closed.

Returning to the pool, Bryers accepted his sandwich from Clare. “You'll never guess what I just heard,” he said.

“What?”

“You know that novel I thought Wellington was working on? I don't think it's fiction.”

7

K
ARP SHOOK HIS HEAD AS
he leaned back in the chair and looked across his desk at the woman on the other side. “How is it that you always seem to end up in the middle of things?” he asked.

Ariadne Stupenagel shrugged. “Just lucky, I guess,” she answered, though there was no humor in her eyes. She hung her head. “Mick Swindells was a friend of mine. I've known . . . I knew . . . him for a long time. We were the Three Musketeers, me, Mick, and Sam Allen. Now two of them are gone, and I think there's a connection.”

As Stupenagel buried her face in her hands and stifled a sob, Karp pushed a box of tissues toward her. “I'm sorry, Ariadne. I
know they both meant a lot to you,” he said, glancing at Clay Fulton, who sat in a leather chair over near the wall that housed Karp's extensive book collection. “You're sure you're up to this? We can do it some other time.”

Waiting for Stupenagel to pull herself together, Karp thought about their long association, which for many years had bordered on the typical love-hate relationship between a district attorney and a hard-charging member of the media. They'd tangled plenty. She'd want information and he wouldn't give it to her; or she'd write a story that he thought might mess up a case, and they'd have words. But she was one of the best at what she did, and in spite of her zeal to get out in front of her colleagues to be first with the “scoop,” she also had ethics and would hold a story if convinced that it might damage a case or a suspect's right to a fair trial.

Karp stood up and looked out the window of his office eight floors above Centre Street in the Criminal Courts Building. Down below, the sidewalks were teeming with tourists, businesspeople, couriers, vendors, the homeless, criminals, and saints—a microcosm of Gotham's population all sweating together on a hot, humid afternoon while traffic on the streets honked, screeched, and crept along. It was the day after the shooting in Central Park and he wondered how many had even paid attention to the news.

Shootings were such an everyday occurrence that the media reported them as frequently as they talked about the weather. But this one was certainly different. A colonel in the Army gunned down by a former soldier; a brave witness killed by a bullet from an off-duty detective's gun as the witness tried to stop the gunman; the detective, whom the press was hailing as a hero, wounded in an exchange of gunfire.

Karp glanced over at Fulton, who was deep in thought. Fulton had interviewed the wounded detective, Ted Moore, that morning and then called Karp.

“He took a bullet in the leg, but not too bad. They sent him home already; that's where I talked to him. We only got a couple of minutes because he was pretty out of it from the painkillers,” Fulton had reported. “He said he just happened to be walking past the picnic when he saw Mueller walking toward the colonel. Said the guy seemed agitated, so he kept his eye on him, saw them argue, and the gun came out and the colonel got shot. Moore went for his own gun and fired. Poor guy's pretty shook up about the witness who took his first shot, but it was a bang-bang sort of thing. Probably why he hesitated and Mueller got the drop on him.”

“Before Moore shot, did he tell Mueller to drop his weapon?” Karp asked.

“Apparently wasn't time,” Fulton said. “He said he thought Mueller was going to start shooting indiscriminately.”

“What do we know about Moore?”

“Clean record,” Fulton replied. “His dad was a lifer and retired from the Three-Four Precinct in Washington Heights. Still lives with his parents up there. Apparently does pretty well for himself working off duty; drives a nice car, has a boat in the driveway.”

“You've done some digging,” Karp noted.

“You asked me to look into him,” Fulton said with a smile. “Mine is not to question why . . . You buying Mueller's story about Moore being dirty?”

“I'm not buying anything at the moment,” Karp had responded. “There's just something nagging at me about this one, including who's representing him. I wish we could have talked to him before counsel attached.”

After Karp got Mueller to surrender the day before, he'd walked back out of the park and instructed Ewin to drive him downtown to the Criminal Courts Building at 100 Centre Street. A towering gray monolith, the courts building housed the District Attorney's Office and the grand jury rooms, as well as the trial courts, judges' robing rooms and chambers, Legal Aid offices, and Departments of Correction and Probation headquarters.

Karp was waiting for Mueller to get booked and be made available to interview when he got a call from Kenny Katz, whom he'd asked to monitor the process.

Katz was angry. “He barely got in the door at The Tombs when an attorney was waiting for him, demanding that he be allowed to speak to Mueller,” Karp's young protégé said. “He was yelling about Mueller's Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights being violated and causing quite the scene.”

“That was fast,” Karp replied. “Who was the lawyer?”

“Get this, Robert LeJeune III,” Katz practically spat.

“One of the most expensive—and least ethical, I might add—criminal defense lawyers in the state of New York tore his ­thousand-dollar-an-hour ego away from the Hillcrest Country Club to represent a Central Park shooter?” Karp said.

“Yeah, and the intake guys got so flummoxed that they gave him five minutes with Mueller, and by the time he got done, our suspect was invoking his right to remain silent,” Katz replied.

“What in the hell?” Karp said, along with a few other choice words. “I guess LeJeune was watching the news, but . . .”

“He says he's working pro bono for some group called American Vets with PTSD and that he was notified by them.”

“Never heard of American Vets with PTSD.”

“Neither have I, and I know about a lot of these veterans'
groups. Some are better than others. PTSD is a real thing for guys who've been in-country; I've had some counseling myself,” Katz said. “But this is a new one on me. I'll ask around, see if they're legit. But it looks like we're not going to get a statement out of Mueller.”

So all they had out of Mueller were the statements he'd made to Karp at the zoo. He knew LeJeune would probably try to suppress them, saying that his client had been in “constructive custody” knowing he was surrounded and in effect under arrest. But that was why Karp had told him he had a right to an attorney and the right to remain silent. He'd made sure that he later took a statement at the DAO from Ann Franklin, the hostage, to back him up on that.

Something's just not adding up about this
,
Karp thought as he turned back to Stupenagel, who was dabbing at the mascara that had run down her cheeks while looking in a hand mirror. She finished and looked up at him. “I'm good,” she said.

Karp sat on the corner of his desk. “Okay, tell me what's going on here. What were you doing in Central Park talking to the victim five minutes before he gets shot and a gun battle erupts?”

Stupenagel looked at the yellow legal pad on the desk. “Are you taking notes?”

“Not right now. I just want to hear what you have to say.”
Karp didn't elaborate that any notes he took from a witness would have to be turned over to the defense attorney at trial. If she'd been a hostile witness, or the defendant, he would have conducted an in-depth Q&A with a court-certified stenographer present. But Stupenagel was a friendly witness, so all he'd written on the pad was that he was meeting with her and that Fulton was present.

Stupenagel nodded, but added, “Butch, I understand I'm a witness, and I want to cooperate. Mick Swindells was a friend of mine, and I'll do whatever I can to put his killer away. But I'm still a journalist and I promised certain people confidentiality and I can't break that without their permission.”

“I'm not asking you to,” Karp replied. “At least not now. I just want to try to get a handle on what went on and why.”

“Okay. Where do you want to start?”

“From the beginning.”

“I went there to talk to Mick about some information I'd received. Do you remember this past winter about a raid in which an ISIS leader named Ghareeb al Taizi was killed?”

“Yeah, the administration made a big deal about it,” Karp said. “How the president had given the go-ahead and then waited all night in the White House war room for word that it had been a success. There weren't a lot of details, as I recall.”

“Well, it might not have gone down quite the way the White House press office described it,” Stupenagel said. “In fact, there were more players killed during that raid—representing a sort of compendium of bad guys in the region, such as Syria, Russia, and Iran—that maybe the administration didn't want anybody to know about.”

“You mean,” Karp said, “they're meeting with ISIS? So much for the coalition against terrorism.”

“Yeah, that's exactly what I mean,” Stupenagel replied. “Anyway, after these guys got killed by a certain counterterrorism team of good guys, if you know what I mean, some documents and computer files were seized before they hightailed it out of there. They didn't get much of a chance to look the stuff over because when they got back to base, they were met by an Army unit and were forced on orders from ‘high up,' and I mean
really
high up, to turn over the documents and files, as well as a prisoner.”

Stupenagel looked expectantly at Karp. “Aren't you going to ask me the identity of the prisoner?”

“Okay, I'll play along. What was the identity of the prisoner?” Karp said.

“Nadya Malovo.”

Karp's face tightened. “Why does that not surprise me,” he said with a sigh. “Where is she now?”

“Well, the feds had her at the maximum-security prison in Colorado,” Stupenagel said. “But a mutual friend of ours got her transferred to the Varick Center across the street.”

“Okay, what does this have to do with the murder of Colonel Swindells?”

“Well, for one thing, Colonel Swindells was in command of the battalion this unit belonged to, though apparently they operate on orders from higher up, and he wasn't present when the documents and Malovo were seized,” Stupenagel said.

“And?”

“And apparently, the little bird who told me about some of this said the counterterrorism team was aware that Swindells was looking into one file in particular that lies at the bottom of all of this.”

“What file would that be?”

“It's called ‘Sarab,' ” Stupenagel replied.

“Sarab? What's that?”

“I don't know exactly. I wasn't told all of the details, but it's an Arabic word that means ‘mirage.' ”

Karp felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up at the same time Fulton sat up straight. She had their full attention. “You said ‘mirage,' right?” Karp said, looking at the detective and back to the journalist.

Stupenagel narrowed her eyes. “I smell another part of this story. What's up, Karp?”

At first Karp hesitated, but then he thought he owed her this much. “This is off the record for now. You can't use it.”

“Yeah, yeah. I got dibs on it when it's time, but what's going on? Why are you and Clay suddenly acting like cats in a lightning storm?”

“The shooter, Mueller.”

“Yeah, what about him?”

“He said this had to do with a black ops raid in Syria this past winter,” Karp said, “and a file called MIRAGE.”

Stupenagel whistled. “When I asked Mick about the raid and Ghareeb al Taizi, he played dumb, said he didn't know anything about it. But when I mentioned MIRAGE, he told me to forget about it, that I was swimming in shark-infested waters. In fact, he said not to contact him again.”

A look of anger took over her face. “Now my friend's dead, and I'm smelling a rat. Have you tried talking to Mick's daughter, Sasha? Maybe he told her something.”

Karp looked at Fulton. “Clay tried this morning.”

“She's obviously distraught and she pretty much slammed the door in my face,” Fulton said. “There was a moment, however, when I thought she might say something.”

“Mind if I reach out to her?” Stupenagel asked. “I was going to anyway, just as a friend of her dad. But I could see if she'll talk to me.”

“Be my guest,” Karp said. “Anything else?”

“Nothing,” Stupenagel said, then seemingly changed the subject. “Isn't Lucy home visiting?”

“Yeah, why? And what's this got to do with . . . ?” A look of understanding crossed Karp's face.

“I think it's time for one of those good old-fashioned father-daughter talks,” Stupenagel said.