"No way," Murrow replied. "Wherever you go, I go, too. Remember?"
"You're sweet, pookums," Stupenagel replied, and kissed him on the nose. "But haven't you ever heard the saying 'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread'? There's no reason for two fools to be rushing around on a night like this."
"Well, I'm a fool for love, so let's quit gabbing and get this over with," Murrow replied.
The pair made their way across the street to the entrance of the Staten Island Ferry. They paid the fare and boarded the ferry, which on a Sunday night was nearly deserted. Any other day or time, and there might have been a few hundred commuters with homes on the island or tourists aboard. In the past, the ferries had carried cars, but all that had changed on September 11, 2001. It was too easy to hide a bomb in a car or truck and so it had been closed to all but pedestrian traffic.
Stupenagel and Murrow were neither commuting nor sightseeing. Several hours earlier, while enjoying a quiet late Sunday afternoon snuggling in the Fifty-fifth Street loft, Stupenagel had received a call on her cell phone from a male whose accented voice she recognized as belonging to her Russian source, the employer of the late Gregory Karamazov. He wanted to know if she would meet with him.
How do I know this is legit? Stupenagel had asked. I'm getting a little sick of people trying to kill me.
The unexpected reply caused the caller to laugh bitterly. I don't blame you, he'd said. This is a dangerous business. I believe that you told Gregory, who by the way was my dear friend, that you were there on a blind date and he replied that you'd come to the right place. But I wouldn't blame you for having had enough. If you like, I can see if what I have to say would interest one of your competitors.
Ooooh, that's low, Stupenagel had replied. Okay, when and where?
The caller had not invited Murrow, but she'd made the mistake of admitting where she was going. Only afterward had she stopped to ponder if the sudden inability to lie to him-she'd always prided herself on being a fabulous liar when necessary-was yet one more sign of the strength of their relationship. He'd insisted on going and no amount of arguing or promising could change his mind, so she'd given in.
Now, as the ferry pulled away from the pier, she was having second thoughts again. You have no right to put him in danger, she admonished herself. But she had to admit, she was glad he was there, standing with her on the exposed stern of the ferry.
All the other passengers were inside, and Stupenagel was about to suggest that they go there, too-despite instructions to remain outside-and get out of the cold, when a tall, strongly built man suddenly appeared out of the shadows. She did a double take, for standing in front of her was a man who, except for the scars on his face and a patch over one eye, bore a marked resemblance to Butch Karp. She glanced at her boyfriend, but he gave no indication that he saw what she did. She shrugged it off as coincidence.
"It is very cold out here," the tall man said.
Here we go again with the corny codes, Stupenagel thought. It might have been funny in a Get Smart television spoof way, except it brought back painful memories of the Black Sea Cafe and the people who'd died there.
"Not as cold as it gets in Siberia," Stupenagel replied.
On the other side of the ferry, Nadya Malovo had worked her way close enough to hear the exchange and smiled. Nor as cold as the grave, Ivgeny my love, she thought, signaling her men to take up positions.
Her spy inside of the Karchovski crime family had called two hours earlier and told her about this meeting. The man had been trembling with fear when he spoke. He was well aware that the last traitor in the Karchovski family had died at the hands of Marlene Ciampi, during a failed attempt to kill father and son Karchovski. The best this traitor could expect if the Karchovskis got wise was a bullet. Or it might be much worse.
However, there was no telling what even a coward would do for the right enticements of sex and money. She'd had to provide both, even though the former had disgusted her. She much preferred sex with women, but it was a powerful tool to use with men. She'd known that since she was a young KGB agent assigned to a Red Army unit in Afghanistan commanded by then colonel Ivgeny Karchovski. He'd used her to relieve the stress of an unwinnable war as much as she'd used him to try to further her own ambitions. But that was more than twenty years ago, and a lot had changed since.
For one thing, Ivgeny Karchovski, a popular officer and recipient of the Soviet Red Star, the nation's highest military honor for courage, was now a crime boss in Brooklyn. But not just some ordinary gangster. Somehow, in a manner she had yet to discover, there was some connection between the Karchovskis and the New York district attorney Karp, who had proved to be a resilient enemy, as well as the man's wife, Marlene Ciampi.
Meanwhile, Malovo was convinced that it was the Karchovskis who had helped track down Andrew Kane at the hideout in Aspen. If not for an eleventh-hour warning from Jamys Kellagh, the plan to take the Pope hostage and blow up St. Patrick's Cathedral might have ended right then.
Malovo had cursed herself for letting her then lover and accomplice, the Palestinian terrorist Samira Azzam, plan the murder of the Karchovskis. Azzam preferred bombs, which Malovo knew had their place as a weapon of terror due to their psychological impact on civilians. But bombs were too inexact and impersonal for Malovo's tastes. She'd discovered in the KGB torture chambers of Kabul that she enjoyed killing on a one-to-one level. She preferred to look her prey in the eye when she shoved a knife into their heart, or put a bullet in their brain. That was the fate she planned for Ivgeny tonight. After that, it would be easy to kill his father, the old man Vladimir.
The icing on the cake would be the death of the reporter Stupenagel. The plot against the Pope would have been at least a partial public relations success-the object being to place the blame on Muslim Chechen nationalists. However, the reporter's stories had thrown the spotlight back on herself, as well as the "shadowy" Jamys Kellagh, and implied that Malovo worked for certain interests who were using Islamic terrorists as the bogeymen to justify the brutal occupation of oil-rich Muslim states in southwest Russia.
It was all true, of course, even if the reporter didn't know the half of it. The Soviet Union was gone, and Malovo didn't work for the Russian government anymore. At least not the "official" Russian government. However, there were certainly among her current employers highly placed and important men in that government, just as there were highly placed and important men among her employers in the Russian mob, as well as among the military and industry.
Their goal was to return to ruling their part of the world with an iron fist that would have made Joseph Stalin proud. But they entertained none of his ideals of a socialist state; their fist embraced greed and their own power over the state. It was a fist that would encourage terrorist acts to blind the already frightened Western world so that there would be no opposition to Russian occupation of the Muslim states and, when the time was right, the extermination of the "Muslim problem"-like the extermination of cockroaches.
Although not directly allied with them, Malovo's masters had found common ground with those for whom Jamys Kellagh worked. They, in turn, were affiliated with those groups in north and west Europe, as well as white supremacists in South Africa, who saw themselves in direct competition with Islamic theocracy for world domination, and who sought to stem the tide of brown-skinned subhumans who bred like rodents and threatened to overrun the planet.
Malovo agreed in principle with the philosophy; however, she left the intellectual debate to those better suited for it. On the other hand, her counterpart Kellagh was a true believer in the cause of the nameless organization that he dedicated his life to but would never discuss. Yet, he killed just as easily as she did.