Infamy (2 page)

“Agreed,” Jaxon replied. “You got what we need?”

“We've grabbed all the hard drives from the desktop computers, laptops, cell phones, and any documents we could find,” the young man replied. “There's a safe we'll blow and clean out as we're leaving.”

“Then let's call in the bird and get the hell out of here,” Jaxon said. He looked at Malovo. “Cuff her.”

Karchovski pulled plastic ties out of a pocket and put them on the assassin's outstretched wrists. “How romantic,” Malovo said with a sardonic smile. “Reminds me of that night in Kabul when we were oh so much younger.”

“I wouldn't remember,” Karchovski said.

“Nonsense. You could never forget, darling,” Malovo said with a laugh, and stood up.

Outside the compound walls, Lucy saw that Ned Blanchett had arrived. She walked up and hugged him. “Good shooting, cowboy,” she said.

“Thanks, sweetheart,” Blanchett replied. “Just like we planned.” He looked at Malovo and frowned. “Where's al Taizi?”

“Dead,” Lucy replied. “Nadya killed him, along with a half dozen other guys, before we got there.”

“We got company,” Jojola shouted. He pointed in the direction of the village, where the headlights of a convoy of vehicles had suddenly appeared and were racing toward them.

“Where's the Black Hawk?” Jaxon asked.

As if summoned at his command, the helicopter materialized out of the night, hovering just a few feet off the ground. There was a small explosion from inside the main building, then the rest of the team came running, one of them carrying a black bag with what Lucy assumed were the contents of the safe.

Less than a minute later, the team was back on board the helicopter as it climbed up and away from the onrushing vehicles. Looking down, Lucy saw red flashes from guns, but they were soon left behind. She turned to find Nadya Malovo watching her. The beautiful assassin sat between two of the younger members of the team, who looked like teenagers who'd suddenly found themselves sitting on either side of a
Playboy
bunny.
How can one woman—especially such a dangerous woman—exude so much animal sensuality?
she wondered.

As if reading her mind, Malovo winked. “Just like old times,” she said. “Be sure to give my love to your father when you see him. Tell him I'll be in touch.”

2

A
RIADNE
S
TUPENAGEL CURSED AS THE
spike of one of her high-heeled black boots sank into the soft grass of Central Park and nearly pitched her to the ground. Without losing her shoe or her pride, she quickly managed to right the ship and continued walking toward the Sunday-afternoon gathering near the Boat House.

Should have worn more practical shoes to a picnic
,
she thought, but then quickly reversed herself.
To hell with that . . . If I can't wear heels, what's the point of living?

The day was stupefyingly hot and humid, even for New York in July, and Stupenagel was annoyed by the rivulets of sweat trickling through various crevasses of her curvaceous body. She
reached up to pat her bottle-blond hair into place and then down to release another button of the sheer red blouse she wore over a well-filled black bra. She'd finished off the outfit with a very tight, very short black skirt.

Pressing her lips together, she assured herself that they were sufficiently covered by her trademark cherry red lip gloss. She then turned up the wattage of her smile and covered the last thirty yards to the men and women milling around a group of tables, one of which displayed a banner proclaiming Welcome 148th Battlefield Surveillance Brigade Reunion Sign-in. As she approached, she was aware of the appreciative glances of the men in the crowd, and the corresponding disapproval of many of the women.

Bold, brassy, and tall even without the heels, Stupenagel stood out in any crowd, and that was the way the hard-driving journalist liked it. At times her in-your-face attitude got her into trouble, and she'd seen her share of jail cells, third world police stations, and various other dangerous situations. In pursuit of her stories, she'd narrowly escaped run-ins with a bevy of psychopaths, hit men, gangsters, dirty cops, tin-pot dictators, and terrorists. But that bravado, and on occasion her over-the-top sexuality, also got her into the offices, bedrooms, and confidences of the rich, the powerful, and the famous. She knew when to resort to guile over confrontation, but if the situation called for a full frontal assault to
overwhelm the enemy's ­defenses, she was the right gal for the job.

She'd toned the libido down in the past few years, especially after her engagement to Gilbert Murrow, a mild-mannered assistant district attorney who was the aide-de-camp for Butch Karp. But she could still work the feminine charm and turn men's heads when needed. The picnic she was about to invade seemed to be just the right situation.

The majority of the fifty or so people gathered were young men with a sprinkling of middle-aged males among them. Of the women, most seemed to be attached to the men—girlfriends and wives—though some appeared to be members of Troop D. A few of both the men and women were in Army uniforms displaying the Ranger patch, though most were dressed in civies of loud aloha shirts and tattered T-shirts. She glanced at the chests of those in uniform and noted the ribbons indicating tours in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Stupenagel also knew that LRS stood for Long Range Surveillance. As the Army's surveillance units in the field, the LRS teams operated behind enemy lines for as long as thirty days at a time. They primarily conducted reconnaissance, target acquisition, battle information, and damage assessment missions. A few of the units, however, specialized in capturing and interrogating prisoners, sabotage, and field assassinations.

Company D was one of those and apparently had carte blanche to do whatever dirty work needed doing, according to one of her sources in the Pentagon. “They have a reputation for being a bunch of cowboys even for a black ops LRS unit,” he'd told her.

I like cowboys
, Stupenagel thought as she sauntered past one group of young admirers. But today she only had eyes for one of the older men. He was tall, and though dressed casually, everything about his bearing said career military. Even the word “older” was relative because except for the lines in his deeply tanned, movie-star-handsome face and a little silver in the crew cut hair above his ears, there was nothing old about him.

The man was talking to an attractive young woman in uniform, standing apart and out of earshot of the others at the gathering. They both turned and frowned as Stupenagel walked up. She wondered if they were lovers.

It had started
a few days earlier with a call from Lucy Karp, who asked if she wanted to go out to lunch. There was nothing unusual about the invitation; she and Lucy's mother, Marlene Ciampi, had met as freshmen at Smith College when fate had made them roommates. They soon became best friends, and even
when their careers and lives had taken them down separate roads, they'd ­remained as close as sisters. So close that when Marlene and Butch had Lucy she'd been honored to be their first child's godmother.

Stupenagel suggested that they meet at the White Horse Tavern, a historic watering hole in Greenwich Village, long known as a hangout for artists, musicians, bohemians, and jour­nalists, everyone from Dylan Thomas to Jack Kerouac. The tavern was a favorite of hers, but as soon as she saw Lucy sitting outside at one of the sidewalk tables she knew this wasn't a social meeting.

Lucy stood as Stupenagel walked up and kissed her on the cheek. As they sat down, she looked her goddaughter over and thought about how she'd changed both physically and mentally. Lucy had her father's unusual gold-flecked gray eyes and her ­mother's dark hair and olive coloring. She'd been something of an ugly duckling growing up—a skinny, precocious child, then a gangly, awkward teenager with a large nose and a stunning talent for learning languages. However, the duckling had blossomed into a swan several years after she moved to New Mexico, where she'd fallen in love with a genuine cowboy—a ranch hand named Ned Blanchett. Since then she'd filled out nicely, though there was no extra fat on her lithe frame; she looked tan and fit due to her
outdoor lifestyle and what Stupenagel thought of as “the bloom of love.”

Yet there was more to Lucy than met the eye. Several years earlier, fate and circumstances led Lucy, because of her language skills, and Ned, a dead-eye rifleman, to being asked to join a small federal antiterrorism agency headed by former FBI agent Espey Jaxon. “The kids,” as well as their boss, were not generally forthcoming with details—everything was “highly classified and hush-hush.” But there'd been occasions when they deemed it appropriate, or necessary, to share information with Ariadne—often a quid pro quo for something she dug up. At such times, they trusted her to do the right thing with the information.

In some ways, holding back or embargoing information bothered Stupenagel. As a muckraking, take-no-prisoners journalist, she was much more comfortable throwing everything against the proverbial wall and seeing what stuck. Having to use her discretion and “act responsibly”—instead of writing it all down and letting the chips fall where they may—made her want to break out in journalistic hives.

Sitting across the table from Lucy, Stupenagel recalled with sadness one of the last times she'd been at the White Horse Tavern. She'd gone there to meet Lieutenant General Sam Allen, a decorated war hero, the interim director of the CIA, and a
former lover. He'd called her out of the blue—it had been many years since they'd shared hot, passionate nights or even a cocktail—but although they reminisced a bit, it wasn't old times in the sack he wanted to talk about.

Disguised in an old Yankees ball cap and ratty sweatshirt, he told her that he had reason to believe that people close to the president were “aware in real time” of an attack on a U.S. consulate in Chechnya. And that rather than provide requested assistance, they had allowed the consulate to be overrun to cover up a foreign policy gaffe. Exactly why, he didn't know.

Allen said he planned to testify before Congress and spill the beans, but added that he was being blackmailed by powerful people who threatened to expose an affair he'd been having. He explained that he was telling her this in case something happened to him and asked her to try to protect the young woman if it did. Unfortunately, Sam Allen was prescient. He'd been murdered the night before he was due to appear before the congressional subcommittee.

The murder of Sam Allen and the cover-up of the debacle in Chechnya was one of those instances in which not wanting to interfere with the pursuit of justice for Sam and those who died in the consulate caused her to hold off writing her story until the men who'd plotted his death were caught, and sub
sequently convicted by Butch Karp. After that, however, the story had taken on a life of its own, first with her exposé of the murder of Allen and the involvement of the president's ­political cronies. Inevitably more sources came out of the woodwork, and she'd written a series of stories tied to the administration's feckless foreign policy, especially when it came to dealing with Islamic extremism. Eventually, she ran out of new material, but she ­believed that she'd hardly scratched the surface of the exact moti­vation for the major players. Even some of their identities had remained in the shadows.

Lucy confirmed that there was more to the story this day at the White Horse. She wasn't at liberty to reveal everything about the mission but asked the journalist if she recalled the story about the death of Ghareeb al Taizi, an ISIS leader in Syria.

“Sure. The White House took credit for ordering the mission,” Stupenagel said. “But I've never been able to get much of anything out of my sources about it.”

“That's because very few people know anything, including the military brass,” Lucy told her. “But it wasn't a Special Forces operation, nor did the administration know anything about it until it was over. It was one of ours, and the target wasn't just al Taizi.”

“I don't understand,” Stupenagel said.

“A few weeks before the mission, we got word that Nadya
Malovo was back working for her Russian bosses and up to some mischief,” Lucy went on. “We'd been trying to find her since that little incident in Chechnya and Dagestan, but she disappeared. Then she popped up back in Moscow, not hiding at all but in the company of a Russian gangster named Ivan Nikitin. The next thing we knew, she was on the move. She got a little careless in Istanbul, and we picked up her trail; we lost it again in Damascus, but then a reliable source in Ramadi spotted her, apparently working as a bodyguard and interpreter for Nikitin. We got round-the-clock drone surveillance on her and watched her drive her boss to a compound outside a village north of Ramadi on the Syrian border. It's the heart of ISIS country, and that alone was curious considering Russia is supposed to be helping us destroy ISIS.”

Stupenagel shrugged. “Gangsters aren't usually patriots. They're trying to make a buck and don't care who they're dealing with so long as they can pay. Let me guess, this Russian gangster is an arms dealer?”

Lucy nodded.
“Yes, that and black-market oil. However, this particular gangster is also a former Russian general known for his brutality during the Russia-Chechnya wars—mass murders of entire villages suspected of sympathizing with Chechen separatists, men, women, and children. He was appropriately
nicknamed ‘Ivan the Terrible.' He's not just any gangster but one with direct ties to the Kremlin.”

Stupenagel raised her eyebrows. “Now, that's interesting. So I take it they were meeting this al Taizi, perhaps with the approval of the Russian muckety-mucks?”

“Yes. So Espey got the go-ahead for a raid. We wanted Malovo and al Taizi, and a chance to question Nikitin, too.”

“But al Taizi got killed?”

“Yep, and he wasn't the only one. By the time our guys got to al Taizi, he and Nikitin were already dead, and so were four other men. The only one alive was Malovo. Just sitting there, cool as a cucumber.”

Stupenagel whistled. “So much for her bodyguard duties. Who were the other guys?”

Lucy looked at Stupenagel for a long moment, then leaned close. “You have to promise me that this doesn't show up in a newspaper article until Espey says it's okay.”

Stupenagel narrowed her eyes but nodded. “Same rules. I get the exclusive and I get to put it out there first.”

“Deal,” Lucy said, and looked around to see if anyone seemed to be watching or listening. “This is where it gets really interesting. It was easy to identify al Taizi, and one of our team members recognized Nikitin from Afghanistan.”

“That would be Ivgeny Karchovski. . . .”

“You said it, I didn't. Anyway, the others took longer while we ran their photographs and fingerprints. Two of the dead guys were just foot soldiers there for security, not that they stood a chance with Malovo. The other two, however, were real somebodies: one, Farid Al Halbi, was a very wealthy businessman from Syria and tied at the hip to the Assad regime; the other, Feroze Kirmani, was one of the top agents with VAJA, the Iranian equivalent of the CIA.”

“So let me get this straight. They're all making nice with ISIS and al Taizi? And Malovo kills them all without breaking a sweat?”

“That's about the size of it.”

“Malovo say why she killed them?”

Lucy shook her head. “Claimed she didn't want to die in a crossfire if her companions resisted. But to be honest, we think she intended to kill them all along.”

“Why?”

Another shrug. “She didn't say much on the way back to the base in Saudi Arabia, except that she was keeping some information to herself. Maybe as a bartering chip. She did tell Espey that the men she killed were waiting for one more important player, someone representing somebody very wealthy, very powerful.
Said she didn't have a name but knows it was an American. But the guy never showed; she thinks he got tipped off about us.”

“Anything to back that up?”

“Well, we were supposed to be a top secret, need-to-know-basis mission, which means not many people knew what we were doing. But there was a ‘welcoming' party when we got back to the Riyadh Air Force Base in Saudi. ‘They' were waiting for us, and ‘they' took everything, including Nadya Malovo.”