"Anything else?"
Karp nodded. "Yeah. I think I'm a pretty good judge of character. I knew that murdering children was not part of who you were. Oh, and by the way, it was Lucy who suggested that we watch the tapes. She's a pretty good judge of character, too."
It took a moment for Jaxon to respond to the last statement. He swallowed hard and said hoarsely, "I think I better call my 'niece' the next time I'm in New Mexico and take her out to lunch."
Karp smiled. "If I'd had any other doubts, you just answered them."
A groan escaped Ellis, who was gradually coming around. Jaxon nodded to his men who had patted the agent down and cuffed him. "Glad we could take this asshole alive. The federal government's going to try to claim jurisdiction, you know."
"Been through that fight once recently," Karp said. "They'll have to wait for justice New York DAO style."
Ellis was brought to his feet, still groggy from the fifty thousand watts of electricity that had coursed through his body from the Taser. He suddenly pitched forward as if stumbling and brought his hands to his mouth.
"Grab him! He just ate something," Jaxon shouted to his men. He jumped behind Ellis and began giving him the Heimlich maneuver to dislodge whatever the man had swallowed. "Get an ambulance! Now!"
"Don't bother," Ellis croaked. "Cyanide salts. I'll be dead before he can dial the number."
Ellis crumpled to the ground, breathing deeply but rapidly. A convulsion shook him, followed by another. "Others will follow me," he whispered, his jaw clenched in pain. "They will not fail. Myr shegin dy ve, bee eh."
Ellis vomited and was racked by more convulsions, then his body stiffened and went limp.
Karp reached down and picked up the envelope with the photographs of the murdered children. Tomorrow, he would place it in the evidence file that would be boxed and sent to storage. But he knew he would never forget their faces.
"I'm tired, Clay," he said as the big detective walked up. "I'm tired of all of this."
Fulton nodded, then patted him on the shoulder. "Me, too, boss," he said. "But tomorrow's another day, and it's time to take you home. Your lady's waiting, and so is mine."
Epilogue
Bill Florence raised a glass of orange juice and brandy to those sitting with him around the table outside Kitchenette. "The blood of patriots and tyrants," the old newspaperman toasted.
"To Vince Newbury and Cian Magee," Father Jim Sunderland added. "Let's not forget whose blood was spilled in the cause of liberty."
The artist, Geoff Gilbert, took a drink and sighed. "I miss those days at Julius's house when we were all so young, and Vince was still part of our little fraternity." He turned his face to the morning sun on a beautiful, cloudless day in April.
"We were fortunate that Vince remembered those days, and came to us when he began to suspect the true nature of the skeleton in his family closet," Judge Frank Plaut replied.
"He remembered the old oath we took," said clothier Saul Silverstein. "We believed in what the Founding Fathers worked so hard to create and swore to protect it with our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor."
"We were also young, full of whiskey and fresh out of law school or just going into business like you and Mr. Florence…or hanging out with the Beats, like our own Geoffrey Gilbert," Dennis Hall noted. "Hell, I didn't even have a year in yet with the U.S. Attorney General's Office, and I'm sure none of us had any idea that our little fraternal oath would end up getting us mixed up in something as big as this."
"I don't know about that," Murray Epstein, the defense attorney pointed out. "Julius Karp was pretty worried about how the ordinary citizen reacts when demagogues like McCarthy dredge up bogeymen in order to secure more power for themselves and the government. I remember him, a little tipsy on the front porch, quoting from Orwell's book, 1984…the part about how the government, Big Brother, used the lie about a false war being waged to keep people in line and stop them from questioning what the government was doing."
"Yes, I remember," Epstein went on. "He thought Ike was saying much the same thing when he warned about the military-industrial complex, an enemy within that could be more of a threat to the Constitution than the enemy without."
"But Islamic extremism isn't a fictional enemy, nor politically compatible with a Big Brother conspiracy…though one has to wonder now that we've learned something of the Sons of Man," Sunderland pointed out.
"Bullshit," Hall scoffed. "Islamic extremism is the much greater danger. It cannot be reasoned with. How do you reason with people who believe that God has told them what to do? In fact, God has given them orders to subjugate the world…they have to obey or go to hell. There's a war for our lives, not just our way of life, going on, and we have to be careful that we don't hamstring the government so much because we're inflexibile-which the Constitution was never meant to be-that we lose both our lives and way of life. We need to keep an eye on government-and beware of those who think like the Sons of Man-but not a foot. There are other books that were as foreboding as 1984…one of them was Mein Kampf. The current appeasers on the left, and the United Nations, could well place us in a position occupied by Neville Chamberlain just prior to World War Two. Now, there's the greater immediate danger."
"Spoken like a true Fox Network propagandist," the defense attorney Epstein scoffed at his friend the prosecutor.
"Oh, a fine thing to say for a CNN lackey," Hall shot back.
"Would you two quit fighting for a moment and tell me why," said Gilbert, "if we know that Dean Newbury is part of this 'evil empire,' we don't tell the FBI or somebody like that?"
"And what would we tell them? That the head of one of the most prestigious law firms in the country-a law firm representing a lot of powerful people and that contributes huge amounts to political action committees and politicians-is really part of a criminal cartel that dreams of taking over the country?" Plaut asked. "We don't even know who else is involved; Vince was never able to get that information for us before they killed him. And the book is gone. I guess it's hindsight and we can blame it on senility and lack of experience at the spy game, but we should have made copies. Now we'll have to try to find another, though we'll have to be careful; they may be on the lookout for anyone asking for it after Cian Magee."
Silverstein shrugged. "We wanted to get it into the right hands, but we didn't know who to turn to. Jon Ellis turned out to be Jamys Kellagh, at least according to our sources, but it could have just as easily been Jaxon. These Sons of Man-sons of bitches, I say-had, or maybe still have, the resources of the government at their disposal and are perfectly willing to kill. We're just a bunch of old farts who stumbled into something much bigger than we anticipated fifty years ago when we were all young idealists. We thought we'd write a few policy papers, protest unjust wars or support just ones, teach law at Columbia like our friend Judge Plaut, support those people and causes, whichever political party they belonged to, that supported the Constitution. Keep an eye out for guys like McCarthy. This group, the Sons of Man, could easily crush us if they knew who Vince gave the tape and book to and that we're onto them. We settled this question a long time ago, after Kennedy. Our role is to watch and work behind the scenes, helping guys like Jaxon do their jobs, while slowly growing a network of others like us."
"Just as long as these others understand what it cost Vince Newbury and Cian Magee," Sunderland said.
"Blood of patriots isn't just a slogan, Jim," Florence said. "But I agree with Dennis that we don't have enough to go to anybody yet. And who would we trust? The FBI? How about V. T. Newbury, the nephew of one of the leaders of this group and an assistant district attorney for New York? We hear he's getting closer to his uncle, especially after this latest bit of news."