Counterplay

checked out his undercover identity, had not.

“I’ve been called worse,” Kane laughed. “But there’s no reason for this to go any further. You cooperate and that bad man doesn’t rape your daughter in front of your wife. Oh, and I’m sure we can provide a videotape of his antics for your viewing pleasure.”

Defeated, Hodges asked, “What do you want?”

“Like I said, I need to know everything you do,” Kane said. “Believe it or not, but I want to be just like Mike. And we don’t have much time so we better get busy.”

Hodges lunged for Kane but was slammed to the floor by his guards. At Kane’s command the guards picked the agent up.

Kane leaned forward until his lips were just inches from Hodges’s ear. “You are a dead man,” he said. “Your mind knows it. Accept it. However, make this easy and your ugly little wife can look forward to whatever miserly survivor’s pension your grateful but cheap government provides her and your brat. Make it tough, and you’ll still die, but not before you watch your family go through hell. So what’s it going to be?”

Hodges knew that he should refuse-that many people, not just himself and his family might die if he cooperated-but he didn’t know or love those people. “I’ll do what you ask,” he said.

“That’s wonderful.” Kane beamed. Another weakling, he thought. No wonder the West will lose this War on Terrorism. They don’t have the stomach for what it’s going to take to defeat religious fanatics like Samira, who will stop at nothing and aren’t afraid to die.

Things were going so well. In the months he spent in jail since his arrest the previous August and his escape in February, Kane had hatched a plan that was part revenge and part the beginning of his “new career,” as he’d taken to thinking about it.

The plan was brilliant and efficient because it fit both his own purposes and those of al Qaeda. Through his lawyers, he’d managed to convey the general outline of the plan to the group; Kane’s requirement was that they first had to help him escape and then allow him to accomplish his personal goals regarding Karp et al.

The risky escape while en route to the psychiatric hospital had become necessary when his original idea to have himself declared legally insane had been thwarted by the state’s psychiatrists. Their examination had been a loathsome experience, but he’d put up with it for his greater good.

Without admitting anything regarding the charges against him, he’d answered most of their other questions quite truthfully, including that his father had screwed his daughter, which is how baby Andrew had been conceived. His sister/mother had been sent away to give birth; after which, his father/grandfather, through bribes and “donations,” had arranged with the adoption agency run by the Archdiocese of New York to “adopt” the bastard child. Kane had learned the truth as a teenager from his sister/mother shortly before she killed herself.

A rather disconcerting event at a vulnerable age, Kane told the psychiatrists. By that he meant the circumstances of his birth; however, they thought he was talking about his mother’s suicide, until he corrected them. That didn’t really bother me all that much, he said. She was a slut. I caught her screwing the old man one day when I came home from school early, you know.

Kane left out the part about blackmailing “the old man” into blowing his brains out in the family library. Otherwise, his purpose in being honest with the state’s psychiatrists was to engender their sympathy, after which they would, of course, declare him legally insane. That would have meant a short stint at a nice psychiatric hospital where, at worst, he’d sit around with a bunch of wackos talking about their dysfunctional childhoods, playing the game, and arrange a relatively easy escape. Ship off to a country with no extradition treaty and resume his master plan.

Only it didn’t go the way he wanted. The bastards had issued their report: while he suffered from several personality disorders as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the shrinks’ bible on such things, he was legally sane. More specifically, he knew right from wrong at the time of the crimes-as demonstrated by his elaborate schemes to cover up his actions. He knew the nature of the charges against him and was capable of assisting in his defense. He was therefore deemed both legally responsible and competent to stand trial.

Someday Kane planned to have the state shrinks brutally dismembered, but for the time being they were quite a ways down on his list of people targeted for vengeance. First, Karp and his bunch.

Plan B had required that his lawyer win the motion to have him tested by a private psychiatrist at a hospital in upstate New York. Kane’s firm had once defended the doctor from a malpractice suit in which he’d been accused of sexually molesting several of his patients. They’d won mostly by painting the women as nutcases suffering from mass delusions. The man could be counted on to say Kane was nuts. The private psychiatrist was just a last resort if something went wrong with the escape plan he worked out with Azzam.

He’d first met Azzam when she accompanied his lawyer to the Tombs, posing as a legal assistant. During subsequent visits he’d discussed the master plan-making sure she understood that it could not be done without his help-including his escape. I want what happens to the guards and any “spectators” to be as brutal as possible, he whispered to her out of the hearing of even his lawyer. I want them insane with anger-with their minds set on recapturing me and bringing us all to “justice,” they won’t be anticipating us to strike such a blow that they’ll wish they’d never heard of Andrew Kane.

Or al Qaeda, she’d reminded him.

Yes, yes, al Qaeda. He’d smiled.

Kane had been attracted to the young Palestinian woman’s cold-blooded nature. Her arrogance and disdain for him made him want to subjugate her to his sexual whims. Again through his attorney, he’d conveyed his wishes to her handlers, who’d responded by ordering her to make herself available to him when he was free. He was aware how much she despised him the first time he took her, and it had just excited him more. He also knew about her lesbian lover, Ajmaani, and had gone out of his way to demean Azzam in front of her. He’d hoped to evoke some hint of jealousy but was disappointed when the woman didn’t react.

After escaping, Kane had been quickly and quietly transported to Aspen and the home on Red Mountain of the Saudi prince, Bandar. The facial reconstruction surgery by Dr. Buchwald had been performed in the house. Meanwhile, Bandar’s family was told that the visitor was a distant relative who had a fatal, and contagious, disease and wasn’t to be disturbed or talked about with their friends in town. Bandar’s self-involved wife and children had shrugged at the information and paid little attention to the comings and goings at the guesthouse.

As Kane healed, he dreamed of taking revenge against those who’d ruined not only his bid to become the mayor of New York City but also, given his malevolent grandiosity, taking up residence in the White House. Then he would have been among the wealthiest men in the world and the most powerful man in the world.

There was no telling what he might accomplish as president. He could use his influence with al Qaeda to terrorize the American public into being willing to accept the “temporary” relaxing of certain parts of the Constitution, including the number of terms a president could serve. Hell, when they see you tame the terrorists, who will have been bought off in exchange for his cooperation with establishing the caliphate in the Middle East, he thought, and bring Pax Americanus to the Western world…my world…they’ll make me president for life… emperor.

Along the way, he would destroy the Catholic Church in the United States. He blamed the church for having gone along with his father/grandfather to keep the shameful secret of his conception. They’d all let him think that he was the bastard son of some trashy whore who’d given him up for adoption like one might throw out spoiled milk. Every day of his young life, he’d had to live with being told how lucky he was that his adoptive “father” had “rescued” him from a life of waste and drudgery.

Of course, all the blue-blood sons at the boarding schools he’d been packed off to had laughed at him both behind his back and to his face. They’d called him “the bastard” and spread rumors, such as his mother had been a prostitute. It got worse after his sister/mother swallowed a medicine cabinet full of pills and then slit her wrists in the bathtub while he was home on vacation. Then the rumor became that he’d been “porkin’ ” her and that was the reason she killed herself.

He’d hated them. But the talk in front of his face had largely disappeared when he castrated the bully who’d been raping him in the dormitory. It had been a good lesson in how to deal with difficult people. Cut their balls off, figuratively or literally, whichever did the job.

And until Karp stuck his Jew nose where it didn’t belong, he had been setting up the Archdiocese of New