Fanatics Read online

  A grim lesson that wasn’t lost on Flo.

  Target

  9:49 A.M.

  “Unlike the late Mr. Busta, we don’t have millions in our budget to stop killers sworn to strike,” Flo said to Frank Murphy.

  They were riding downtown in an unmarked police cruiser, headed back to Senator-elect Cecil King’s office.

  “Anywhere is a possibility, Flo, except maybe a locked, windowless room.”

  “Not much of an option. Not for the senator.”

  10:24 A.M.

  In Cecil King’s office, Flo Ott and Frank Murphy began their first examination of the scenes of past Double-A Committee assassinations.

  “This is the only one we got on video,” Cecil said. “The Episcopal bishop in Denver, Colorado. Alejandra Carla Garcia. A gay woman, she lived openly with her partner for about twelve years.”

  The murder was recorded on digital video eerily reminiscent of the amateur Zapruder film, that brief visual memento of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963. But with several significant, updated differences. The murder video opened at the start of an outdoor Episcopal Communion service at which Bishop Garcia was presiding, an uneventful record until that point in the service when she raised the host for consecration and her head snapped sideways, two rounds smashing into the side of her skull.

  “Why?” Flo said. “Why is everyone suddenly looking the exact opposite way?”

  “A car exploded,” said Cecil. “Perfect timing.”

  Bishop Garcia’s assassination video was soundless except for the continuous voice-over of the Double-A Committee’s charges against her and the intoning of her death sentence. Flo found it almost boring until the moment when the bishop’s head snapped sideways, and she collapsed, and the uneventful video became a record of deadpan, ghostly surrealism.

  “Nothing much to watch,” Cecil said. “Until that point. And then it all just comes at you, right out of nowhere.”

  No, nothing much, Flo thought, if you didn’t already know the climax, all Communion services being predictable events, liturgical movements choreographed centuries before with prescribed precision. The assassins, with only a little homework, would have been in for no surprises. In Flo’s view, an ideal situation for a planned killing.

  “Where was the bishop’s security?” she said.

  “The bishop?” Cecil said. “She was a courageous woman. She improved her killers’ odds because she refused any special protection for religious ceremonies. A person of God, she placed her faith and her life in the hands of God.”

  “So did the assassins,” Flo said.

  The killers, on the murder video’s looped soundtrack, cited biblical scripture in defense of that sacred institution of marriage, and professed their abiding faith in traditional family, all as justification for the death sentence, and a promise of the approaching end of days. The tremendous brutal logic of history, as they saw it, demanded killing.

  Cecil replayed the killing moment.

  “As soon as the bishop collapsed,” he said, “a car blew up only a block away. You can’t hear it on the video, but that’s what distracted the crowd and gave the shooter, apparently firing a long-distance rifle with a scope and silencer, those extra few seconds to get lost. And then a second bomb, the insurance bomb, went off just in case he missed the first time. The second bomb covered the assassin’s escape.”

  They watched the finale of the assassination video. Around the square, acacia trees swayed gently in a soft midmorning breeze, and altar attendants in red cassocks and white surplices were rushing to the fallen bishop’s side.

  But in front of the stage at about ten yards’ distance, as if one great body, the entire congregation was turning toward the sound of the exploding car.

  And at that moment, the stage opened almost directly beneath the altar, pressure waves from the second explosion flinging back the first rows of congregants, folding chairs collapsing and tossed about like toothpicks in a hurricane as smoking gushers of fire rose to a height of about fifty feet. Bobbing on top of the flaming geysers were shattered sections of the altar, a splintered tree, a torso in a red cassock, a bloodied leg, a mass of flaming-bright objects and dark inflammable material raining down on a stunned and terrified congregation.

  Here the video ended with “A foretaste of Armageddon,” the voice-over’s final words.

  “There’s a sound recording, too,” Frank Murphy said. “A tape of the Communion service made by someone from the bishop’s office. The recorder was left on. The Denver police emailed us the audio file. We’ll have their forensics reports this afternoon.”

  Outside the district attorney’s office, an autumn wind whined like a hungry cat scratching at the windows.

  Inside, from Frank Murphy’s laptop, the fading sounds of the explosion were replaced by screams, desperate cries for help, someone sobbing close to the recorder’s mike, another person hysterically shouting curses, before all these human sounds were drowned out by the wailing sirens of fire engines and ambulances.

  “Incredible,” said Flo. “And the Double-A took full credit for every bit of this slaughter? Not a hint of shame?”

  “I believe in the Lord,” Cecil said, his voice subdued. “But I promise you, I won’t ask Him to do your job. He’s got enough on His hands. We won’t make the same mistake the poor bishop made.”

  Again, Flo Ott, Frank Murphy, and the senator-elect watched the last moments of the assassination video. The camera’s point of view was somewhere at or not far behind the rear of the crowd. The lens was telephoto. The picture remained steady even during the explosion, so the camera was probably mounted on a tripod.

  It was impossible for them to tell if the scene in the square was recorded from a position outdoors, on a low roof perhaps, or with a camera set up in a window.

  Of all the killings claimed in the last ten months by the Aryan-American Committee for Defense of Homeland, Family & the Sanctity of Motherhood, Bishop Garcia and her altar attendants were the only deaths preserved on video and propagated over the Internet.

  The Double-A’s first victim, the Massachusetts congressman, was shot in his bed in Washington’s Tabard Inn hotel at about four o’clock in the morning. The Double-A Committee had pronounced his sentence only a few hours before. But no one paid much attention. A crackpot message. In the middle of the night. From a group no one ever heard of before.

  Since then, however, the Double-A had more than overcome its obscurity. Since then, the Double-A had run up a record, trumpeted in its boastful announcements, of nineteen assassinations.

  Since then, the Double-A vied for headlines with the year’s presidential election campaign. And some pollsters and pundits even credited the Double-A for giving the victor her slim-margin ticket into the White House. A default reaction against right-wing extremism.

  GOP leadership cried foul, of course, although their condemnations of the Double-A Committee, while extant, were far from overwhelming. And some in the Grand Old Party even went so far as to claim, without evidence, that the members of the Double-A Committee were actually left-wing provocateurs financed from abroad.

  But none of this political jiggery-pokery figured now in the Brooklyn detectives’ view of their assignment. They dismissed the shuck and jive.

  “We’re dealing with butchers,” Flo said. “Fanatics. And they’ve got at least one big difference from al-Qaeda crazies and any other Middle Eastern rebels. They get away every time. They make sure of it. They’re not about to kill themselves.”

  “Right,” Cecil said. “The ultimate contradiction, sane psychos.”

  “Cowards, more like it,” Frank said. He released a puff of air through his nostrils. “But you know bastards like these, Flo? I think we got a break. I think we got some edge here.”

  “Could be. They want to live, they want to do it again. At least so far. It’s an opening.”

  11:05 A.M.

  Cecil King’s office grew silent except for the con
stant wind whining at the windows, that hungry cat begging to be let inside.

  Preventing the promised murder, Flo knew, would be far removed from solving a killing. Loaded with the threat of more evil to come, every step would occur as in a horror movie, unexpectedly, and with full intent to terrify.

  Flo and her colleagues wouldn’t be retracing the steps of a past crime here but descending into an abyss.

  Flo sensed—she would have been inhuman not to—that Cecil King also realized precisely this. And his terror was now her terror, as she and the senator-elect and Frank Murphy were staring into this pit of death and darkness pretty much on their own, without any meaningful federal help or any extra budget from the mayor.

  She dismissed the idea of private guards. Who could be trusted? And Cecil King wasn’t a rich man. He was no Ballz Busta, not that millions of dollars had helped keep the rap star alive.

  Flo considered the assignment—preventing murder—exactly as she considered a homicide already committed, by first examining her own limitations. Otherwise, she couldn’t probe the limits of killers, penetrate their minds and maneuver to trap them. Flo’s mind was her reliable censor, constantly assessing, rejecting, re-forming the story her mind wanted her to tell or hear.

  Her job was to slither up inside a snake, to penetrate and untangle the serpentine knots of a plot hatched in minds utterly unlike hers.

  Her record of homicide arrests and convictions was beyond reproach. But the danger with any strong awareness of her own limits, she realized, was assiduous caution, aversion to risk; this particular plus for solving murders was a minus in stopping assassinations.

  Just keeping Cecil King alive now would be challenge enough. Stopping the Double-A, and extinguishing its ambitions, demanded that not only the senator-elect, but all of them had to stick their necks out, and this also included the mayor and the police commissioner, regardless of whether or not they were willing to run incalculable risks.

  The Double-A Committee wouldn’t be leaving them much choice.

  Nor would the Double-A, confident in its demented dogmas, obedient to a voice beyond stars, fervent in faith, have any other choice, not as long as a safe homeland and rescuing the American family lay within their grasp, only a few assassinations away.

  Flo said, “Senator, I’d like Frank to go back home with you this afternoon to assess the layout. Your family’s apartment and everywhere around the immediate area.”

  “Let’s do it,” Cecil said.

  12:40 P.M.

  The King family lived in a sixth-floor apartment in an eight-story building on Eastern Parkway opposite the Brooklyn Museum, with a broad, open view over the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and in the distance on the other side of Flatbush Avenue, the Prospect Park Zoo.

  A prime location. Frank Murphy’s relieved conclusion, on admiring this view: No close rooftops high enough for snipers.

  His assignment from Flo: “Just keep him home the rest of the day.”

  Rearraignment

  1:42 P.M.

  Flo Ott entered Kings County Criminal Court in downtown Brooklyn for a rearraignment hearing scheduled for a two o’clock start.

  For an hour, she had to leave the threat to Cecil King’s life entirely in Frank Murphy’s hands, while waiting for the preliminary forensics report on Owen Smith’s corpse, and now keeping a promise to a friend caught in impossible trouble.

  A young woman named Annunziata “Annie” Agron had been arrested on a charge of armed robbery at an ATM machine on the corner of Seventh Avenue and President Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The arresting officers were William Patrick Magee and Antonio Francesco Dente, both patrolmen, both in their late twenties, both Staten Island residents.

  Flo was attending the rearraignment, not in any official capacity—no one had been killed during the alleged armed robbery—but simply to observe as a friend and a potential character witness on behalf of one of the two tenants in her home’s upstairs rental apartment: the accused felon of murderous intent, Annie Agron, a welfare department social worker.

  At the initial arraignment, a few hours after Annie Agron’s arrest, the court had assigned her a lawyer from the Legal Aid Society’s pool, to ensure appearances were kept up, all formalities fulfilled.

  The assigned lawyer had no time for preparation and not much attention span left by his seventh arraignment of the afternoon session.

  He was a harried young man, another victim of case overload, bouncing breathlessly from arraignments to trials to prison cell visitations. No surprise then, when the patrolmen’s version of Annie Agron’s alleged armed robbery proved compelling. But at least the Legal Aid lawyer secured bail for his client, a not impossible task, since the accused had no prior criminal record, was a city employee, and a college grad.

  Flo Ott’s other tenant, Annie’s roommate and partner, Betty Fitzgerald, was an experienced attorney, albeit a family-law expert, who’d never appeared at an arraignment or any other kind of criminal law procedure. Family law—separations, divorces, child custody suits—was her specialty.

  Betty Fitzgerald had no idea at the time that Annie had been arrested, and when she found out that Annie’s case at arraignment was referred on for trial consideration, she was desperate to find competent counsel. Flo Ott, their friend and landlady, recommended Robert J. Keating, Esq., Golden Bobby, the criminal defense bar’s ultimate aureate mouthpiece. Golden Bobby owed Flo a favor. Earlier that year, she’d certified a fat-fee client of his for a cooperative witness protection program.

  And Bobby was meticulous in repaying his business debts, particularly when the creditor was a prominent member of the law enforcement establishment. He stepped straight up to the plate for Annie Agron.

  “Well now, Lieutenant!” Golden Bobby greeted Flo in the hall outside the hearing room for the rearraignment. “How’s by you? What’s happening?”

  “Hi, Bobby.” Flo was no longer quite as amazed as she had been the winter before, when first meeting Robert J. Keating, Attorney-at-Law. She’d grown accustomed to his outsized presence, a sort of African Buddha, a bejeweled, mirthful, extramundane mass of a man: cappuccino-colored, six feet tall and, at about three hundred pounds, almost the same footage in circumference as in height. His shaved head, impeccable tailoring, and manicured nails projected a persuasive air of proximate perfection with the demeanor to match, as close to a resplendent demidivinity as one might ever expect to encounter in the criminal courts of New York City. On meeting Bobby for the first time, it was hard to know whether to genuflect, shake his hand, or kiss his ring—a platinum job set with a ruby at least the size of a plum.

  Flo offered him her hand, and with two hands he raised it to his lips. His gold cuff links dazzled. “I’m so honored, Lieutenant”—his voice was basso profundo, his tone Sunday-church-choir jubilant, sincerity vitalizing every word—“that any friend of yours should become an esteemed client of mine.”

  He smiled a broad smile, so warm it made Flo laugh as always, a smile that exposed his mouth full of lustrously gold teeth, as welcoming as a splash of Caribbean sunshine after a New York sleet storm. Golden Bobby earned his winning appellation.

  He led the way for his new client, Annie Agron, and her partner, Betty Fitzgerald, all walking with dignity down the long hall to the hearing room.

  Annie Agron had short, dark hair, a soft mouth, and sad brown eyes. She was wearing a gray flannel skirt, a navy blazer, a white blouse, and high-heeled black calfskin shoes. Except for the shoes, and the sad knowing eyes, she might have passed for an Upper East Side prep-school senior.

  Betty Fitzgerald, on the other hand, looked like any other hard-nosed divorce lawyer, an avenging angel in a black pinstripe suit. “Annie never should’ve been arrested,” Fitzgerald said to Golden Bobby. “Forget referred to trial.”

  “I’ve no objections to that,” he said. “Speaking purely technically, of course. Annie’s so obviously innocent. It hurts me to know our criminal justice system—and even our New York’s finest
—could have made such a colossal blunder. I’m truly shocked.”

  “Yeah, right,” Flo said. “Shocked. Now tell it to the judge, Bobby.”

  2:05 P.M.

  The hearing room, devoid of decoration save for two American flags, a New York State flag, and a New York City flag, had space for about fifty spectators.

  The chamber was more than half empty. Present were defendants, a few family members, defendants’ lawyers, and assistant district attorneys, these last mainly young men and women not long out of law school. All waited their turn before the judge.

  The Honorable Lydia Compton was an African American woman in her mid-forties, a judge with an air of patience not unlike that of a presidential foreign affairs adviser, a thoughtful presence surrounded and harassed by ambitious generals and ignorant ideologues, each insistent on his own self-seeking position.

  Judge Compton’s patience would be put to the test this afternoon.

  Recollections of a crime, in Flo’s experience, seemed to acquire a dark indestructibility as infinite and as inescapable as memories are particular to the persons recollecting.

  In this case, once Annie Agron’s rearraignment hearing began in Judge Compton’s court, the accused, and the two arresting officers, patrolmen Magee and Dente, had experiences to relate that were banking up all around them, a huge wave that seemed poised to break over their heads, certainly if Robert J. Keating, Esq., had anything to say about it.

  Annie Agron, aggrieved, frightened, anxious, didn’t even glance at the patrolmen who arrested her for armed robbery.

  Officers Magee and Dente were both in uniform, caps off, and both appeared quite put-upon by this experience. Not only were they appearing in court, again, on their own time, no additional pay for the extra hour or so, but they were less than encouraged to find their perp now represented by the African Buddha Golden Bobby, every prosecutor’s nemesis.