Lucy turned to Jaxon. "Was that Agent Tavizon who got shot?"
"Yes, but the bullet just grazed his temple. Other than being stunned and a little bloody, he's a lucky boy who'll live to fight another day," Jaxon replied. "I thought you were in New Mexico."
"I was," Lucy answered.
Jaxon waited for more of an answer, but when it wasn't forthcoming he added, "You want to tell me what you're doing here and, once again, arriving in the nick of time?"
Lucy remained silent, then Ellis took her by the arm. "I believe that's my line, Jaxon. Thanks, but we'll handle the debriefing on this." His men surrounded Tran and Jojola, and another was helping Ned Blanchet to his feet.
Lucy looked over her shoulder at Jaxon as she was being led away. He was standing over the assassin's body. He glanced up and their eyes met. She couldn't tell what she saw in his expression before he quickly looked down again, but his body seemed to sag from some unseen weight.
22
It wasn't until hours after the shooting that Karp heard about the assassination attempt. He, O'Toole, Meyers, and Fulton had been holed up in a room at the Grove Hotel in downtown Boise reviewing the case, going over strategy, and running through O'Toole's testimony and what he could expect on cross-examination.
Meanwhile, Marlene had been coordinating the various needs and requests of the 221B Baker Street Irregulars, who would be arriving in Sawtooth a few days before the trial. "We're having a hard time getting the right equipment to the site. It will be there, but it might not be until the day the trial starts," she'd told Karp that day before they heard the news from back East. "Sorry, but we may be pushing it to help you."
"That's okay," he'd replied. "I hope you find Maria Santacristina, but we're not counting on it. I'm going into this thinking we're going to have to dance with the dates we brought to the ball. But I'll save you a spot on my dance card for the second day if you think you can keep up."
"Oh, I can keep up, buster," Marlene responded. "If I remember correctly, it's Marlene, ten, Butch, zero, for who quit first out of our last ten dances?"
"Who's counting," Karp said, and laughed. "Besides, I wasn't talking about that kind of dancing."
Not until he got back up to his room later and turned on the television did he learn about the St. Patrick's Day Parade events in New York City. Stunned, he'd glanced at the telephone and saw that the message light was blinking, which had turned out to be a call from Lucy-saying she was all right and would be in touch shortly-and another from Marlene, who was in Sawtooth, angrily scolding him for turning off his cell phone and then relaying the news from Manhattan.
They tried to assassinate a U.S. senator! Of all the terrorist acts that had been attempted or accomplished in recent years, this one struck Karp as more a thrust right to the heart of what America stood for than all the bloody massacres. Not worse, nothing was worse than the taking of innocent lives, nothing more reprehensible than murder in the name of God. But those events were easily seen for what they were: evil, senseless-serving only to harden the resolve of the West to stand up to terrorists.
This, however, had been an attempt to shake fundamental American values by trying to silence a voice that was warning the American people not to let fear carve away at their civil liberties. A voice that was demanding the truth regarding what was really behind Kane's escape and the attack at St. Patrick's Cathedral, the bombing of the Black Sea Cafe, the murder of Cian Magee, and the attempted hijacking of the Staten Island Ferry.
It made him wonder if maybe the conspiracy nuts were in some way right, maybe the enemy within was more dangerous than the enemy without. After all, what did it matter if the terrorists were defeated if there was nothing left worth saving? If the Constitution could be ignored, or shelved for convenience, if a senator could be selected for assassination because he demanded the truth, why was he, Butch Karp, in a federal courtroom in Boise fighting for one man's right to those constitutional protections?
Officially, the Department of Homeland Security had released a preliminary report stating that Paul Stewart, a disgraced member of the NYPD, had been acting on his own. "It appears that Stewart had not selected any particular person," according to the press release. "But that he intended to shoot 'targets of opportunity' in an attempt to avenge his dismissal from the New York Police Department and gain publicity."
Neighbors of Stewart in the Bronx apartment complex he lived in had been quoted by the media as saying the shooter was an angry man whose wife had left him following his dismissal from the NYPD. The reports noted that Stewart had been kicked off the force after being implicated in the burgeoning "No Prosecution" files investigation by the DAO.
"He told me that he was going to get even with the city," an anonymous man was quoted as saying in the Times.
Stewart's past and alleged statements had led to widespread speculation that Stewart's intended targets had been the mayor and the chief of police. "He may have also hoped to shoot District Attorney Butch Karp, who he apparently blamed for his dismissal," the Times story reported.
Karp, of course, knew better than the "official version" released by the Homeland Security Department. He'd been told the entire story by Lucy and filled in on other details by Jojola. However, Jon Ellis had requested that no one contradict the department "while we investigate Lucy's information about the Sons of Man and see if we can locate them."
The department press release had also indicated that Stewart's plot had been foiled by "concerned citizens, who acted bravely and swiftly in the face of great danger to themselves." The citizens had not been named "out of regard for their safety, in the unlikely but possible event that Stewart had an accomplice."
Even Stupenagel had not yet picked up on Lucy's involvement. Television clips of the assassination attempt had been played ad nauseam. However, most of the cameras had concentrated on the viewing platform or had swung around wildly in the confused melee and had difficulty picking out the shooter and the "concerned citizens" until it was over. Then the television cameras had focused on shots of Stewart lying on the ground with the hilt of a knife protruding from his back and federal agents escorting several people away from the scene with blankets over their heads to protect their identities.
One week removed from St. Patrick's Day, Karp stood in a federal courtroom in Boise, Idaho, still trying to come to grips with the enormity of the attempt to kill Thomas McCullum. He was a few minutes from the beginning of voir dire, the jury selection process for the O'Toole trial, but his mind was back in Manhattan.
If the assassination attempt and the various other terrorist acts associated with it weren't enough to worry about, Manhattan was still serving up plenty of other "normal" crimes to keep the DAO hopping while he was gone. Two days before the O'Toole trial was to begin, Assistant District Attorney Harry Kipman, who was acting DA while he was on leave, had called to let him know that they had a new high-profile homicide case.
Charlie Campbell, the Manhattan borough president and a candidate for the Eighth Congressional District, had returned home to his Upper West Side brownstone to find that his three young children-one of them an infant-were missing. His wife, Jessica Campbell, who was discovered asleep in the master bedroom, woke and happily announced that she'd saved their children from Satan and that they were in heaven.
They haven't found the bodies, Kipman had said. And the press is all over this one big-time. They're already running stories that Mrs. Campbell suffered from postpartum depression and had attempted suicide after her second child's birth.