Текст книги "Greed"

Автор книги: Dan O'Shea

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CHAPTER 93

Lynch watched a powerfully built older man walk down the ramp from six. One of the uniforms stopped him, but the guy just smiled handing the uniform a cell phone, the uniform listening for a second and then stepping aside, still holding the phone to his ear. The guy was at least sixty, probably more, looked like he could still throw a punch if the mood struck him. Expensive suit, spring weight camel hair coat. Guy looked like Brian Dennehy maybe ten or fifteen years back. He walked directly to Starshak.

“Captain Starshak, before you fuck things up to the point where I can’t unfuck them, perhaps you and I could have a word.”

Starshak ignored the guy and looked past him to the uniform who’d let him pass. The uniform looked back sheepishly, still holding the phone like he didn’t know what to do with it.

“Too busy playing Angry Birds to do your damn job?” Starshak barked. “Who is this hump and what is he doing in my crime scene?”

The cop opened his mouth and then closed it, didn’t know what to say. The Brian Dennehy guy took the phone from the cop’s hand.

“Actually, the phone’s mine,” the man said, handing the phone to Starshak. “And it’s for you.”

Starshak took it, listened, his face impassive. He listened for a long time. He never said anything. Then he handed the phone back to the big man and turned to address the cops.

“Listen up, people,” Starshak yelled. Everybody stopped, turned. Starshak pointed at the big man. “This guy’s name is Munroe. Don’t ask me who he works for, cause I don’t know. But I’ve heard from the chief, who’s heard from the mayor who, for all I know, has heard from the fucking President. Good work on al Din, that’s the word. Atta boys all around. Now we dumb-ass local yokels are supposed to step back and let the big boys do their jobs.”

“This is totally fucked,” said Lynch

“Tell me about it,” said Starshak.

“Will somebody get me a damn coat?” Hickman said, sounding whiny.

“Shut up,” said Munroe.

Lafitpour said nothing at all, standing to the side, not moving. He wasn’t asking anybody for a coat.

Bernstein walked over. The tech was done with him for now, ribs wrapped, left arm in a sling, bound tight to his chest, his ruined blazer and a raid jacket draped over his shoulders.

“What’s he doing here?” Bernstein asked, nodding toward Lafitpour.

“Don’t know,” Lynch said. “Hasn’t said a damn thing. No ID on him, don’t even have his name. And I get the feeling Joe Washington here likes it that way. But he’s awful damn quiet, that’s for sure. I guess the cat’s got his tongue.”

“Persian cat, I bet,” Bernstein said. He stepped up to Lafitpour, directly in front of him, got in his personal space, staring him down. “Bahram Lafitpour, Chicago’s mysterious wizard of Wall Street. What are you now? Second richest guy in town? Won’t do interviews, not even with the financial press, don’t like having your picture taken. And here you are, playing cops and robbers in your shirtsleeves.”

Lafitpour’s eyes flashed with anger, his jaw tightening.

“Careful, Slo-mo,” Starshak said. “I don’t think he’s used to the help talking to him that way.”

“Wait until I try it in Hebrew,” Bernstein said.

Lafitpour spat in Bernstein’s face. Starshak nudged Bernstein aside and drove a fist into Lafitpour’s gut, doubling him over for a second, but Lafitpour straightened quickly, glared at Starshak.

“I don’t give a shit what your connections in DC say,” Starshak said to Munroe. “A suspect spits on a cop, that’s assault. We don’t do assault.”

The Munroe guy chuckled a little shook his head. “You know what? You shut up too, Bernstein. Fucking Jews. Always too smart for your own good. You wonder why everybody’s pissed at you all the time.”

Bernstein turned toward Munroe. “Do I know you?”

“Nope,” said Munroe. “But I know everybody. Oh, and this guy?” He nodded toward Lafitpour. “He’s not here anyway.”

CHAPTER 94

An hour later, Munroe slid the Do Not Disturb sign aside and stuck the key card into the door at the low-end motel out on North Avenue. Card had been in al Din’s wallet. He’d left Hickman to ride herd on the FBI team that was processing the garage in the Loop. Little worried about Hickman. He was getting scared and whiny now that they had a little excrement on the fan blades.

Starshak, Lynch’s boss, he didn’t roll easy, raised quite a stink, trying to get Chicago guys to process the scene, saying the shootings were homicides, and homicides weren’t federal. Munroe had to make some more calls, push the Chicago PD brass to get a better leash on their people. He needed the locals all the way outside the tent on this thing. Fuckers were smarter than he thought, Bernstein putting an ID on Lafitpour; that was a free radical he didn’t need.

And Lynch, Munroe knew about Lynch from the whole cluster fuck the year before. That guy was like Joe Frazier, punch him in the head all day long and he was just going to keep coming, next thing you know you’ve busted your hand on his skull and while he works your body, cracking your ribs one at a time. Had Chicago PD on ice for now, but he knew they be picking at whatever they could pick at. Just needed to box this mess up, get a bow on it, and blow town.

Munroe pulled on a pair of latex gloves. He’d check the room first; decide what he wanted going into the official paperwork. And what he didn’t.

Two beds, shitty desk and chair, cheap dresser, Laptop on the desk, laptop bag on the floor by the chair. He’d be taking that, send it east, let the tech weenies out at NSA see what they could wring out of it. Al Din had a phone in his pocket, which was in Munroe’s pocket now. Put that in the same pouch. Nothing in the drawers. Underwear, socks, some shirts all neatly folded in the suitcase that lay open on the second bed. Three more phones in there, all the same make and model. Throwaways, probably, picked up at a 7-Eleven somewhere. Munroe powered them up one at a time, checked. No call history, no messages, no texts. Leave those for the Feebs; give them something to play with.

Bathroom. The usual shit, although the bottle of Acqua di Gio next to the sink went for something like seventy bucks. Looked like al Din’s tastes had gotten a little too refined for Sandland. Munroe was more of an Aqua Velva guy himself.

Closet. Pants and shirts, all ironed and hung up, couple of sport coats. Munroe checked the labels – Armani, Cardin, all high-end stuff. On the floor, next to a couple of pairs of expensive loafers, an aluminum case.

Munroe put the case on the bed, tried the latches. Locked. Bastard. Munroe pulled a leather case from his pocket, took out a couple narrow metal picks, had to fuck with the case for a minute. Out of practice. Didn’t do that much breaking and entering these days, not personally. Better than usual locks on the case, too. But the latches popped. First one, then the other. Munroe lifted the lid.

The case was lined with stiff black foam, six identical slots cut into it. Five of the slots were empty. In the sixth, Munroe saw a flat black metal tube with a couple of buttons on it. Pretty sure he knew what that was.

The little fucker had deployed the other five, probably some kind of failsafe play. If Munroe made a move on him, al Din could set them off. Or maybe just a safety net, make sure, when he came in, that he had a hole card, something to play if he didn’t think Munroe was honoring the deal. Or maybe he was gonna jack them up for more cash.

The why didn’t matter. Munroe had five devices in the wild that he needed to find ASAP.

He pulled out his phone dialed a number, gave the guy on the other end the address and room number. “I need a runner here soonest. Then get on the phone to Fort Dix, find out the closest Level 3 biohazard lab we’ve got around here, one we can use on the QT. I got a device I needed eyeballed yesterday.”

“Got it,” said the voice. “Anything else?”

Munroe had an uncomfortable thought. Al Din had a phone on him. Gotta figure, if the devices were his failsafe, then he could set them off remotely. That scene in the garage? Did al Din have time to push a button?

“Yeah. Monitor the emergency channels.” Munroe thought through parameters. They’d been tracking al Din as best they could ever since Munroe got the call in Saigon. Fucker’d been everywhere. “Following counties: Cook, Lake, DuPage, Kane, Will, Kendall. Tap their public health systems, too. You start hearing anything unusual, anybody calling CDC for advice, anything like that, I need to know.”

Munroe ended the call, packed al Din’s computer into the laptop bag and closed the metal case. Did a quick scan. Fuck, power cord had come loose from the computer, plugged in under the desk, lying on the floor. Feebs find that, they’re going to start asking about the missing computer. Munroe bent down, yanked the cord, stuffed it in the bag. There was a single knock on the door. Munroe slipped out his Walther, cracked the door. Small guy in motorcycle leathers, Kawasaki Ninja in the spot behind him, next to Munroe’s car, black helmet on the seat.

“I’m your runner,” he said.

Munroe gave him the packages, called Hickman, told him the Feebs could toss the room now, looked at his watch. Not quite 11am. Long day already, and it just got a hell of a lot longer.

CHAPTER 95

The Eagle was in the stairwell at Northwestern Memorial, coming down from eight to seven. Nudged the door open just a fraction of an inch to make sure it was unlocked. It was. Supposed to be unlocked in hospitals, but needed to make sure there was no exception due to the security around the target.

Been on the floor earlier, sticking to the far end, past the nurse’s station. The cop was leaning on the desk, chatting up a blonde who was doing some charts. See where he was tomorrow, then make the call whether to come from the right or the left. Liked the layout, the way the nurse’s station was tucked in to an alcove, the seats facing away from the target’s room.

Already been down the other stairwell, the exit stairwell. Nice little gap under the stairs at the bottom of each flight, space enough to dump the sweater and wig. Be a while before anyone found those. A little variety on the scrubs, but the dark blue was dominant, so go with that.

Nothing more to see here. Time to do a little shopping.

CHAPTER 96

Starshak followed the ambulance to the ER, Bernstein riding with him. Took a while for the docs to finish up with Lynch, stitches on the outside of his thigh from a few inches below his hip damn near to his knee, his whole thigh wrapped in bandages. Starshak on the phone a lot while the docs worked. The brass, DA, review board, seemed like pretty much anybody from any federal agency anywhere that felt like calling him.

Bernstein got X-rays: did in fact have a cracked rib. Not much to do for that. Nurse wrapped him back up.

When they were done, Starshak drove them to Bernstein’s place first, Bernstein grabbing a sweater he could work his arm into. Then they headed to Lynch’s condo, Lynch pulled on an old BC sweatsuit, the only thing he could fit over his thigh.

Then the three of them sat at Lynch’s kitchen table.

“You guys OK?” Starshak asked. Bernstein nodded, said nothing.

“Just a scratch,” Lynch said.

“Big fucking scratch,” said Starshak.

“Yeah,” said Lynch.

“That wasn’t what I was asking.”

“I know.”

The three of them quiet for a while.

“Never been shot at before,” Bernstein said. “Never shot at anybody.” He sounded a little hollow.

“You did good,” Lynch said.

“Right,” said Bernstein. “Took a round in my iPhone, emptied my clip, I think I got one guy in the calf.”

Lynch shrugged. “Four guys, three with machine guns, you stood your ground, did your job. You weren’t there, I’d be dead.”

Bernstein nodded. They were quiet again for a while.

“We got lucky,” Bernstein said.

Lynch nodded.

“Hardin and Wilson hadn’t stepped in…” The thought trailed off.

“They say why they did that?” Starshak asked. “They could have walked clean.”

Lynch shook his head.

“You got any ideas?”

Lynch pursed his lips, looked out his window for a moment. “They’re just on the right side, I guess.”

“Running up quite a body count for being on the right side,” said Bernstein.

“I’m OK with the bodies,” said Lynch. “Corsco’s goons? Hernandez’s goons? And from what I can see, nobody that didn’t come after them first. Hardin stole some diamonds maybe, but not in my jurisdiction, and look who he stole them from? And Wilson? Stand up cop, up until this week. You look at their history, what we know about the two of them now, this shit with her brother, Hardin does two tours, then gets chased out of his own country by some punk hood, spends a decade in Africa taking out other people’s garbage. I don’t know. You’ve got the law, and that’s great. Most of the time, for most people. But the law never did shit for either of them. So I think maybe they just go by right and wrong, now, as best they can. I hope they come out of this OK.”

Quiet again. Lynch got up, walked stiff legged to the cabinet, got out a bottle of Bushmills, three rocks glasses, set the glasses on the table, poured them each a couple of inches.

“You were on the phone a lot,” Bernstein said, looking at Starshak.

“Yeah. Lots of new friends.”

“Any idea what’s going on?”

Starshak just shook his head. “You two would know better than I would. Seems you two were participating in an operation vital to national security and helped to derail a significant terrorist plot. That’s what I’m told.”

“Felt like we were just getting shot at a lot,” Lynch said. “There’s something else, though.”

“What?” asked Starshak.

“Hernandez, al Din, I mean fuck it, right? What are we going to do? A couple of Chicago cops? We’re gonna clean up the international drug trade, stop terrorism? But that shit with Ringwald, al Din taking out his whole family, that points at Corsco.”

“The South Shore thing, too,” said Starshak.

Lynch nodded. “Corsco we can do something about.”

“You got an idea?” Starshak asked.

“Maybe,” said Lynch. “Hey, Bernstein, what do we hear about Fenn?”

“Expecting a full recovery, give or take. They’re keeping him another couple of days.”

“Let me think on that,” Lynch said. He looked up. “Anybody hungry?”

Bernstein looked surprised. “Yeah, actually.”

“We can head downstairs, get something. Big fucking heroes like us; maybe Starshak explains that to McGinty, we get a freebie. Besides, we gotta keep our strength up. You can sweat the moral dilemma all you want, Slo-mo, but you’re going to find out the true human tragedy of pulling your piece.”

“Which is?”

“Paperwork.”

“Actually, that’s the good news,” Starshak said.

“There’s good news?” said Bernstein. “Something from one of your phone calls?”

Starshak nodded. “Yeah. The good news is no paperwork. This was a task force deal, remember? Evidently you were on loan. They’ll write up your paperwork, you’ll just have to sign it.”

“For the best, I guess,” Lynch said. “How am I supposed to write it up when I don’t know what the hell is going on?”

“We get to perjure ourselves?” Bernstein said. “That’s the good news?”

“Maybe,” Starshak said. “You gonna be able to prove that anything they feed you isn’t the truth?”

“Will my lips still move when I speak?” Lynch asked.

“Of course,” said Bernstein. “The dummy’s lips always move.”

“Thought I felt somebody’s hand up my ass,” said Lynch.

Starshak’s cell rang. He answered, listened for a minute, then hung up. “We’re supposed to get down to the Federal building, some kind of pow-wow, learn all our lines.”

CHAPTER 97

Munroe was in a windowless conference room in the Kluczynski Federal Building at Adams and Dearborn, and he was in a good mood. Turned out al Din’s computer security wasn’t that great. Still a lot to work through, but Munroe had Atash Javadi cold. That was huge. Javadi, he was the right wing’s go-to guy on Islam, half the politicians in Washington had him on speed dial. Hell, Langley’d had the bastard in to consult more than once. SOG had already snatched Javadi up, nice and quiet. Had him on a Lear out of Mitchell up in Milwaukee, headed for the proverbial secure, undisclosed location. If they could flip him, run him as a double, they’d have their best set of eyes ever into Tehran. Even if they couldn’t, the stuff they’d get out of him? Priceless. And they would get it out of him. They always did.

Munroe had the early rundown on the device from al Din’s room from some slide-rule types down at Argonne National Laboratory in the southwest ’burbs. It was Heinz’s bio-terror cocktail. Really pure, professionally weaponized shit. Remote trigger; ran off a cell phone. But Lynch must have got al Din before he could push the button. Because if al Din had pushed the button, there’d be weird cases popping up in ERs all over hell by now. Techies said give them a week and they’d work out a way to get the receivers to send out a signal. Then they’d fly in some boys from Fort Dix, pick the rest of the devices up on the QT. Said the things should be safe until then.

But you never put all your eggs in one basket. Not in this game. So Munroe kept up the full court press on al Din’s timeline. If he could find the devices faster, he would. All around the room, he had guys cataloging, mapping and time-lining every al Din sighting since he hit town. Data out of the Chicago system, various municipal feeds around the suburbs, the toll way cameras, private security. He’d pulled some strings, had some pocket protector types feeding everything into a couple of Crays out at Livermore. Sped the processing way the hell up. They were filling in the gaps pretty quickly.

He had his chat with Hardin and Wilson. They already had their money and Munroe couldn’t get it back. He’d tried. OK, win some, lose some. They’d gotten what they wanted out of the deal – they got to kill Hernandez. They pretty much knew the rest of the story and were ready to play ball, just so long as Munroe understood that, if he ever came after them, or if they even thought that he was trying, they’d go all Snowden on his ass. They had the whole story spooled up online somewhere ready to pop up in unfriendly inboxes. We’ll see about that, Munroe figured. People get careless after a while. So friends for now. In a year or two, Munroe’s story would go from being news to being history. Once it was history, anything Hardin might say wouldn’t be a competing story in the media cycle; it would be revisionist nut-job conspiracy babble. Munroe would revisit his feelings toward Hardin and Wilson then.

Munroe’s phone pinged. The Chicago PD crew was on its way up. The last bit to lock in place.

Starshak, Lynch and Bernstein got off the elevator, some suit with an ID badge ushering them to the end of the hall and into a big conference room on the right overlooking the Calder statue in the plaza below, Lynch gimping along stiff-legged. The suit stood in the corner like a chaperone, hands clasped in front of him.

Hardin and Wilson sat at the table, backs to the windows, Hardin finishing the last couple bites of a sandwich. Nothing on Wilson’s plate but crumbs. Mess of food on the credenza against the wall to the left: big basket of kaiser rolls, cold cuts, pasta salad, fruit, platter of cookies and brownies.

Wilson looked up. She had a bandage on the left side of her face, near the hairline. “You guys here to get your minds right?”

“That seems to be the plan,” Lynch said. “Food any good?”

She shrugged. “Better than no food. I’ve been hungry for lunch all day. It was looking like I wasn’t going to get any.”

“I know what you mean,” Lynch said. “If I’d known breakfast was going to be my last meal, I would have paid more attention.”

Hardin swallowed the last bite of his sandwich. His left arm was in a sling

“You OK?” Lynch asked.

“No damage to the joint, just the meat. I’ll be fine. You?”

“Just stitches. Thanks again, by the way.”

Hardin shrugged. “Hey, thanks for not shooting us on sight. I’ve got a feeling that was the plan with pretty much everybody else.”

“Couldn’t have shot you if I wanted to,” Lynch said. “My trigger finger was tired by that point.”

The door across the hall opened, Munroe stepping out. Lynch just got a glimpse into the room before the door closed – pictures and street maps wallpapered everywhere, mess of guys in shirtsleeves and ties milling around, mess of laptops on the table.

Munroe crossed the hall, stepped into the big conference room.

“You guys get enough to eat?” he said to Hardin and Wilson.

“Sure,” Hardin said.

“Yeah,” she added. “Stunned by your largesse.”

Munroe smiled, turned to the suit in the corner. “Nobody was talking out of school in here, where they?”

“Just small talk,” the guy answered.

“OK, take Hardin and Wilson upstairs. I’m gonna have a word with these guys.

The suit paused a second, opened his mouth once, then closed it, then opened it again.

“Sir, Hickman asked that an agent witness all interviews.”

Munroe chuckled. “You’re taping all the interviews, right?”

“Yes sir.”

“Seems kind of redundant then, doesn’t it?”

“Yes sir, but I have orders from Hickman.”

Munroe’s smile went away. He stepped up close to the agent. “You piss off Hickman, what’s the worst that can happen to you?”

“I could lose my job sir.”

“You piss me off, what’s the worst that could happen to you?”

The man didn’t answer for a moment.

“I’ll take Hardin and Wilson upstairs, sir.”

The suit left the room, led Hardin and Wilson down the hall toward the elevators.

“You guys hungry?” Munroe asked, his smile back. “Help yourselves. Want something we don’t have, I can get it.”

“Beluga caviar, maybe a bottle of Moët Chandon,” Bernstein said.

Munroe laughed. “Fucking Jews. Always busting my hump. I hear you were asking about Pardo a little ways back. You want some pastrami, I’ll send for it. You want Beluga and champagne; I’ll call Chuckles the Suit back and have him shoot you.”

Hickman came storming into the room.

“Damn it, Munroe, you agreed I could have an agent at all interviews. We need to do things buy the book now.”

“Now?” said Starshak. “Gee, that would imply that maybe some rules got broken earlier. Hard to imagine.”

Hickman reddened a little.

“Yeah,” Munroe said. “Tell the nice police officer what you mean by ‘now’.”

“I mean by the book now and always,” Hickman said.

Munroe smiled again. “And when we get to the interview, we’ll call the agent back. Right now, we’re just a few old warhorses shooting the shit over lunch. Anybody with a battle scar is welcome to stay. That leaves you out, counselor.”

Hickman’s face got even redder.

“Don’t feel bad about the scar thing,” said Bernstein. “I just got mine this morning.”

Munroe closed in on Hickman, his smile disappearing again.

“Hickman, why don’t you go take a leak or something, so you don’t hear anything you’ll have to deny at a confirmation hearing someday.” Hickman stood his ground for a second, then walked out of the room. Munroe closed the door.

“Shut it off Morty, all of it,” Munroe said.

“OK,” came a voice from the ceiling. “You’re clean.”

Munroe got up, walked to the coffee pot over on the credenza, poured a cup. Walked back to the table, sat down. “I’m going to play it straight with you three, see how that works out. What I tell you, there’s no record of it, not anywhere, so you start shooting your mouth off, it’s your word against mine, and I don’t exist. So basically you’ll be talking to yourselves about what the voices in your head told you.” Munroe took a sip of the coffee, set the cup down. “Shit got out of hand. But the bottom line is this. We were flipping al Din. Hadn’t wrapped the deal yet, but we were close. He gave us the scoop on Iran running a fake Al Qaeda op here in Chicago. Seems, Khamenei and the mullahs over in Tehran were worried that, with us pulling out of Afghanistan, that was going to free up our resources to start paying more attention to them and their nuclear ambitions. So they were planning 9/11 the sequel. Plan was to pin that on Al Qaeda, keep us chasing ghosts around Waziristan for another decade or so. So that’s one thing.

“The other was this. The deal the Iranians were planning, al Din would have been the guy pulling the trigger on it. Guess he watched the Bin Laden take down, realized we hold a grudge about this kind of thing. Did the math, figured out, best case, he’d spend the rest of his life hiding in some dump somewhere waiting for Uncle Sam to zero a drone in on him. That’s where the Iranians miscalculated. Turns out al Din isn’t very ideological, just wants his payday and a nice place to enjoy his sunset years.”

“So you were making a deal with him? Guy we’ve got lined up on at least nine homicides, he was going to spend his time on some beach on the taxpayers’ dime?” Starshak said.

Munroe shrugged. “You say homicides, he says targets. I say collateral damage. It sucks, no way to unsuck it. But yeah. The deal was he gets paid off, we get to wring out his brain, and we get what we need to call Tehran on its bullshit.”

“Those homicides?” Starshak said. “How is it some guy who doesn’t exist gets to make a deal that has to come out of the Cook County DA’s office?”

Munroe shook his head. “You never charged him, you never even had him in custody, and now he’s dead, so that all pretty much falls into the spilt milk category. Where we still got a problem is we got a parking garage full of bodies to explain, OK? And I’m sorry a couple of you guys got nicked up, but it looks like you’re both gonna be fine. But here’s the thing, we had al Din on one side of this deal and Hardin on the other. Hardin got stuck in town with a shitload of hot rocks after Stein got whacked, he needed a buyer, and he was talking to us. Then this business with him and Hernandez cropped up and that presented a whole new opportunity. Gave me some terrorist diamonds and Hernandez in the same place at the same time, everything I need to sell a whole new war on terror story and put a real dent in the mess down in Mexico.”

“You’re admitting to a criminal conspiracy, you know that, right?” Starshak said.

“Grow the fuck up, will you?” Munroe with an edge to his voice now. “Who do you think is winning this goddamn War on Terror? Us? In 2001, we were running a surplus. The economy was humming. Iraq and Iran gave us a nice little balance of power in the Middle East, and the fact that Tehran had to worry about Saddam getting another invade somebody bug up his ass kept them plowing most of their defense budget into conventional weapons. Then Bin Laden pulls his little surprise party. We gut Iraq for no good reason other than George Jr thinks maybe they dissed his daddy back in the day. We spend something like two trillion chasing ragheads around camel town. We turn whatever rep we had on the Arab street into ass wipe by acting exactly like the Crusader fuck ups Bin Laden knew we would. Pakistan, in case you don’t read the papers, is teetering on the edge of becoming the first fundamentalist Islamic state with its own nukes, Iran’s working on becoming the undisputed power in the region – and if their Hezbollah puppets manage to keep Assad on top in Syria, they might actually pull it off. Our economy is in the toilet, and Congress and the President are pissing on each other in the kiddie pool trying to decide how not to default on our debt. Hardin’s a big boy. He decided to steal a mess of diamonds from a mess of terrorists. He didn’t think that could end badly, then he should have thought again. And this Wilson or whatever her name is, she got into bed with Hardin knowing who he’d been screwing with. That ain’t safe sex. Things are seriously fucked, but Tehran has finally stepped on its winky with this deal, and I’ve got a chance to start the unfucking process by bloodying their nose but good. And what you gentlemen have to understand is I will do whatever is necessary to get that done.”

“You got a point to get to here?” Lynch asked. “Or did you just need an audience to practice your neocon spiel?’

“OK boys,” Munroe said, “Here the pitch. Turns out this Hardin’s got all kinds of interesting friends, including some DGSE types from back in his Foreign Legion days. We spin that into Hardin being an operative with a friendly Western power, and an ex US Marine at that, then he’s not a thief anymore, then we got him inside this operation in a role that will pass the smell test with the media. That’s just crooked enough that the Frogs have signed off on it. They love this kind of shit. All we gotta do is let them send some guy over from the Consulate so he can take a bow during the press conference. With Hernandez putting shooters on the field, God bless his psychotic little heart, we got everything we need to sell this drugs-for-diamonds financing thing. Wilson is the DEA’s inside player, another hero. And you boys, you’re Chicago PD’s contribution to the proceedings, the tough guys with the local know-how to make this whole thing work out. And Lynch, thanks to the tabloids, you’re already everybody’s favorite hot cop. Now you’ll be the guy who put out al Din’s lights. What the press gets is this: US and French intelligence penetrated an Iranian false flag operation. Tehran was financing the deal by selling blood diamonds to the Cartel to make it look like an Al Qaeda play – and most of that is true, if that makes you Boy Scouts feel any better. In cooperation with the Chicago PD, we bounced the exchange today, terrorists were killed, brave men were wounded, and Chicago was saved from a fate worse than 9/11. Hardin and his girlfriend get their payday, the French back our play, I get on with the business of making the world safe for democracy, and you guys get to be heroes. All you gotta do is smile for the cameras, take your bows, and keep your goddamn mouths shut.”

Long pause. Lynch could see a vein popping on the side of Starshak’s neck.

“This fate worse than 9/11, you wanna fill me on that?” Starshak said.

Munroe shrugged. “Biological attack. Our guys projected between thirty and a hundred thousand dead, depending.”

“That’s been taken care of?”

Munroe was coming as close to leveling with these guys as he did with anybody. For one thing, he liked them. Damn good cops. Smart, tenacious, big brass ones, and Lynch did take out al Din before the little fuck could pop the cork on his toys. Second, these guys had real good bullshit filters. He knew their type. If they thought he was feeding them a pile of crap, they’d start picking at it, trying to find something that made sense. No, the right play was to give them as much of the truth as he could, hope they saw the reasons for it, show them they were boxed in on all sides, and hope they could live with it. Hell, they were cops; they were used to living with shit. Warrants tossed because of bureaucratic slip ups, psychos walking because some shrink sold a jury a sob story, civil liberty types tying their hands any way they could. At least this time all the bad guys ended up dead. They even got to kill one of them. The worst one of them. No threats, not with these guys. A guy like Lynch? Threaten him and he’d never stop coming after you. Threaten him and you had to put him down. Munroe didn’t want that. He liked the guy. Put him down if he had to, of course, he’d put all three of them down if he had to. Just wouldn’t threaten them first. That would be a waste of time.