Fatal Conceit (33 page)

He would have Blair's story and the tapes, plus Stupenagel's testimony. But obviously the defense would attack Blair's credibility. She slept with men for money. That was how she'd met Allen. They'd already “let slip” to the media that Allen had been having an affair with her. Obviously, they'd exploit that and use it to obfuscate the prosecution's case.

Baum could be tied to Lindsey through the NSA identification cards. But the defense could claim he was a rogue agent acting for others or in his own interests. Maybe even claim the cards were forgeries. But Lindsey had admitted that the dead men were his agents. The call Karp had Blair place to Connie Lee in which Lee suggested that her friend meet the president's national security adviser to hand over the computer had driven a nail in the defendants' coffin.

However, Karp always operated under the premise that there was no such thing as too much incriminating evidence, so he played a couple more hunches. One was that despite Lindsey's assurances that he would come alone, Karp was sure he would have a team standing by ready to swoop into the theater and take Blair into custody. “But before the guys in the dark suits, aviator glasses, and black Hummers appear, he'll make sure she's in the theater,” he noted to the others, looking specifically at Fulton, “which means he'll be in radio contact with his team. I want to know what he says from the moment he arrives.”

In addition to wiring the theater so that they could record the exchange between Lindsey and Blair, the NYPD “techno-geek” who'd worked for Fulton was positioned in the building across from the theater when Lindsey arrived. He then quickly located the frequency of Lindsey's radio and recorded everything that was said. “If she runs, take her down.”

Of course, any number of things could have gone wrong, such as Lindsey's team going into the theater with him and preventing Blair's escape. That could have been dangerous for the young woman; as Marlene pointed out, it wouldn't be enough to have the computer, the witness would have to be silenced. So a bum pushing a shopping cart, a prostitute on the street corner, and a hot dog vendor—all NYPD cops and part of Fulton's DAO team—were ready to move and prevent any “shot while escaping” scenarios, just in case. But the plan had worked to perfection; Jenna escaped without having to alert the bad guys that the DAO was on to them.

Still, Karp needed to tie Fauhomme to the computer. His assessment of the man's character and paranoia determined it was a good bet that Lindsey had been instructed to take the computer to Fauhomme so that he could see what was on it. So Karp asked the computer expert if there was a way to track the computer's whereabouts, as well as plant a listening device on the machine.

“The problem is that if I just install, say, a GPS device that is constantly broadcasting its position,” the computer expert explained, “if someone does even a cursory sweep looking for the device, and I assume they will, they'll find it. Same thing with any physical bug I add to the machine's hardware.”

“So it can't be done without being discovered?” Karp asked.

“I didn't say that. What I can do is install a couple of apps in the software and bury them so deep that the bad guys would have to have someone like me go through all that computer language and know what they were looking for to find it. Both of the apps would be ‘sleepers'—they won't turn on until someone tries to view the webcam recording. When someone does, the apps will ‘wake up'; one will send a signal as to its location and the other will turn on the computer's microphone. I'm betting that only the main guys will be allowed to open that recording file, too. They're not going to want to let just any techno-geek like me see that.”

“I believe you're right there,” Karp said. “And they think they're getting the computer from a frightened young woman, not a ‘computer savant.' That sort of subterfuge probably won't cross their minds. So have we made a copy of the webcam recording?”

The technician shook his head. “No, I waited on that,” he said. “If we download it or attempt to send it via email, these guys would be able to know that. So I made a copy the old-fashioned way; I set up a video camera and recorded it. It's not a great copy, but not bad either if they go ahead and destroy the original, which is what I would do.”

That plan, too, had worked like a charm. Then he moved swiftly to indict Fauhomme and Lindsey for murder but still
waited until after the election to have them arrested. Although he had questions about how high up the cover-up of the events in Chechnya and Allen's murder went, it wasn't his job to tell the American public whom to choose as their next president. And more important, the fallout from the arrests was going to be immediate and intense; he didn't want to give any credence to accusations that he'd timed the indictments solely to influence the election.

Karp sighed as he picked up the receiver. Tomorrow the firestorm would begin. But tonight he was a father with a missing daughter whose life hung in the balance.

“Yeah?” he said into the phone.

“We have them, Butch,” Fulton replied. “And more than we bargained for.”

The big man had noticed Fauhomme's girlfriend had a bruised face and noted her venomous statement telling her boyfriend to call his own attorney. So as soon as he'd deposited Fauhomme in the police car along with Lindsey—and told the uniformed D.C. officer to stay in the car and “take notes” on anything they said—he'd gone back up to talk to Connie Rae Lee.

Fulton could be physically intimidating, particularly if he was angry and scowling. But when the occasion called for it, he could be a big teddy bear who put witnesses and sometimes even suspects at ease so that they'd talk freely.

When he first went back into the condominium, Lee had been reluctant to say anything, he told Karp. But he sat her down on the couch, got her a drink of water and a cold washcloth to press on her bruise, and then said that she didn't deserve to be mistreated. He later told Karp that she'd looked like she was about to burst into tears and that's when he added that good people had to stand up to evil in the world or it would continue to be perpetuated.

“She sniffled a couple more times and then the dam broke,” he said. “When she started talking, she couldn't stop. You're going to
love what she has to say. I'm making arrangements to get her back to Manhattan and over to your office tomorrow.”

“Thanks, Clay, get some sleep and I'll see you later today.” He hung up the telephone and stood up. He could use some sleep himself. It was probably going to be in short supply in the days ahead.

T
HE OLD MAN WITH THE
donkey laden with firewood hesitated at the gate of the mosque near the two guards, who were smoking cigarettes. He glanced at two young farmers who were quickly approaching.

“Move along, old man,” said one of the guards, who nodded at the donkey, “and take your wife with you.”

“I don't understand a word you're saying, but I take it that it wasn't very nice,” the old man replied as he walked back to adjust the donkey's burden by tugging on a rope.

“Huh?” replied the second guard, glancing at where he and his comrade had leaned their rifles against the wall. “What kind of language are you speaking? Where are you from?”

“I take it neither one of you ugly sons of bitches speaks Navajo,” the old man replied. “That's okay, I was just going to suggest that you begin singing your death songs.” He grinned and gave the rope a final pull just as the two young farmers reached the donkey.

•  •  •

The odd thought,
Daudov was speaking Navajo,
passed through Lucy's mind just a second before what sounded like a large angry
insect thrummed over her at supersonic speeds, followed by the muted thud of that insect impacting a soft but solid object. The next sounds arrived together—a pained grunt and the noise of a loud rifle from the top of the hill outside the mosque.

Unlike in the movies, Raad was not blown off of his feet by the 7.62mm NATO Ball Special M118LR7 cartridge from the M24 bolt-action rifle fired by the sniper. However, the heavy bullet obliterated his heart before traveling down and out the small of his back. He grunted again, looked down at the deceptively small hole punctured just off-center in his bare chest, dropped his gun, took a step forward, and collapsed. For a split second, nobody did anything except watch Raad die before he hit the ground. Then everybody began to move at once.

But not in time to save one of the guards, who had his gun trained on the driver and passenger of the truck that had brought Nadya Malovo into camp. The top of his head disappeared in a spray of red blood from the sniper's second shot.

Meanwhile the tall passenger, Ivgeny Karchovski, and the driver, Espy Jaxon, dropped to the ground and reached beneath the chassis for the semiautomatic handguns stashed there. They came up firing as the other guards tried to scatter, unsure whether to shoot back or worry about the sniper on the hill first. Two fell to Karchovski and Jaxon but the others got to cover and began returning fire, forcing the pair to retreat behind the truck.

Al-Sistani ran for a low wall, followed by two of his men. Jumping behind the wall, he cowered on the ground while shouting at his men to “attack the infidels!” One man stood and tried to rush the two men behind the truck but was cut down by a bullet that struck him in the stomach, causing him to double over, and a second to the head that finished him off.

Another of Al-Sistani's men, who'd gone inside the mosque with Huff, emerged on the balcony of the minaret above the grounds and began firing down into the courtyard. He was unaware of the sniper lying in the tall grass on the hill and paid for his ignorance
with a round that caught him in the torso, spinning him violently around so that he lost his balance and fell screaming to the ground below.

In the meantime, outside the mosque, about the same time the sniper's first bullet was punching a hole in Raad, John Jojola, posing as an old man with a donkey, gave the rope a final tug while the two guards watched in confusion with cigarettes dangling from their open mouths. The firewood fell from the beast, revealing three AK-47 rifles that had been tied beneath the wood; the two young farmers, Daudov's fighters, grabbed them, tossing one to John Jojola.

Further confused by the sound of a rifle and the ensuing pandemonium that suddenly broke out inside the courtyard, the guards were slow in reacting. Then, realizing the danger, they tried to get to their rifles but were just fast enough to die with the weapons in their hands. Jojola and the other two then went through the gate, firing as they ran.

•  •  •

Raad had hardly hit the ground when Daudov jumped up and then reached for Lucy. “Can you run?” he asked.

“I don't think so, my legs . . . they're not working,” Lucy replied. Kneeling had not done her any favors and she knew it would waste time to try. “I'll crawl. But leave me, get Al-Sistani!”

Daudov looked at her hard and then nodded. He dove for the gun that had fallen from Raad's hand and picked it up. Glancing back at her, he said, “Inshallah! Go with God!”

“Inshallah,” she replied. “You, too. Thank you.”

Lucy watched as the Chechen patriot began to race toward where Al-Sistani was cowering, behind a wall, while his men rallied around him. But bullets were digging into the dirt and skipping off walls around her, too, and she knew she had to move to
reach safety. Painfully, she began to crawl toward the open door of the mosque, where a certain blue-robed saint stood in the shadows beckoning her.

Ned Blanchett slammed another cartridge home in the M24 and looked through the scope to watch as his fiancée crawled slowly toward the door of the mosque. He could see the puffs of dirt and plaster where bullets struck around her, and he was sure she would die. And yet, while it sometimes appeared as if she was moving through a swarm of bullets, none seemed to touch her. There was nothing more he could do for her but find another target and eliminate as much of the danger as he could.

Although he was terrified for her, it beat thinking he might never see her alive again. During the attack on the Zandaq compound in Chechnya, a mortar round had landed on the roof where he and a partner had set up their defensive position. The blast had thrown him off the roof, but as fate would have it, he landed in the branches of a tree and immediately lost consciousness.

Apparently Al-Sistani's men had not looked up when they were combing the compound grounds executing the wounded and rounding up prisoners. All Blanchett knew was that at some point later, just as the sky was lightening up to the east, he woke up to see the face of Lom Daudov hovering above him.

All in all, he'd been lucky. He'd broken a couple of ribs and had a concussion but all of his comrades were dead, “except for Lucy and Huff,” Deshi Zakayev had explained. “But they are in the hands of the man who perpetrated the attack, Amir Al-Sistani.”

In the days that followed, Blanchett had been on the run with Daudov, constantly moving from one place to another—a farmhouse here, a city apartment there, and once an abandoned mine shaft that had been converted into a hidden bunker. As pressure from the Russians heated up, apparently with the complicity of the U.S. government, there'd been grumbling among Daudov's men that Blanchett should be used as a pawn in negotiations, perhaps
to exchange for separatist prisoners. But Daudov, in consultation with Zakayev, had refused.

He had also refused Blanchett's pleading to be allowed to try to rescue his fiancée. “You wouldn't make it ten miles,” Daudov said. “Even if we suspect that Al-Sistani is in Dagestan with the hostages, we do not know where; and going to his camp would be like stepping on a beehive.”

“I have to try,” Blanchett begged, and looked knowingly at Zakayev. “Please, you would do the same.”