Capture (Butch Karp Thrillers) by Robert K. Tanenbaum Page B

nights before.
    Moishe held up his arm and pulled down on the sleeve, revealing the number tattooed there by his former captors. “The truth.”
    Karp shook his head and clapped his friend on the shoulder. “From the mouths of bakers…”
    “Hear, hear,” Bill Florence cheered, pulling a silver flask from the interior pocket of his suit coat. “Moishe, if you don’t mind, we sometimes enjoy a little spice with our coffees.”
    “Ah, men after my own heart,” Moishe replied, holding out his cup. “I’ve found that it helps me with my kneading.”

7
    L YING ON A HILLSIDE ALMOST THREE MILES AWAY FROM where his girlfriend was climbing into a motorcycle sidecar, Ned Blanchett peered down the scope of his .50 caliber Barrett M107 at the trucks arriving at the edge of the village below. Otherwise, he moved as little as possible, relying on his Ghillie camouflage suit to blend into the gray-green rocks and brown grasses surrounding him.
    What the hell am I doing here? he wondered, resting his cheek against the LRSR, or long-range sniper rifle. A few minutes earlier, as he waited for the signal from Ivgeny Karchovski, he’d allowed his thoughts to wander back to the days only a few years distant when he was just a simple ranch hand in New Mexico. If he hadn’t decided to go dancing at the Sagebrush Inn south of Taos that night, he might never have met Lucy Karp and her mother, Marlene Ciampi. But he had, and life had never been as simple, or safe, again.
    Not that he had any regrets about the path his fate had taken. A shy young man more comfortable with horses than women, he’d figured he might never meet a woman to settle down with. But he’d fallen in love with Lucy and to his surprise, she with him. The flip side of that was he found himself thrust into the violent and bizarreworld of the Karp-Ciampi clan, battling murderers, terrorists, and other psychos.
    At the same time, he’d come to accept that without her, he would have lived out his life on the range and never gotten involved in a world that seemed so out of kilter with the natural beauty of his surroundings. After the terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, he’d been outraged but also felt impotent to do anything about it. Now here he was, a member of a secret agency headed by “former” FBI special agent S. P. “Espey” Jaxon, preparing to assassinate a terrorist.
    When Jaxon first approached him about signing on, the agent explained that he needed team members who were “below the radar.” No one from other government agencies, except for a few trusted men he’d brought in with him from the FBI. He said it was because he wanted people who didn’t have federal personnel files on them. But there was also the implicit message that the Sons of Man, who’d been his particular target, had their tentacles in law enforcement agencies from the Department of Homeland Security to the FBI to the CIA.
    According to the official story, Jaxon and his men left the bureau to work for a private security firm and hefty salary increases. Blanchett assumed that given such a short list of people who could be trusted, the existence of their small force was known to very few people, though Jaxon seemed to be able to summon extensive resources.
    Those resources had apparently determined that the Sons of Man were up to more mischief and that once again Nadya Malovo was central to the action. Apparently, no one had been able to determine exactly what the threat would be, so it was decided that killing Malovo might at least throw their plans into disarray. It wasn’t quite the same as cutting the head off the snake to kill the body—that would have to wait until Jaxon was ready to go after the SOM leadership—more like pulling its fangs.
    By ripping open her heart with a .50 caliber bullet, he thought. The now familiar twinge of guilt rippled across Blanchett’s mind as he contemplated shooting a woman, even one as evil as Nadya Malovo, from