by Dan O'Shea
“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.
So he fed them all the truth he could, but he sure as hell wasn’t telling them there were still five devices hidden around town. They didn’t need to know how close this had come to going south.
“Yeah. That’s been taken care of,” Munroe said.
Everyone sat there, nobody talked.
Starshak’s cell rang. He answered, listened for a while, hung up. “The chief,” he said to Lynch and Bernstein. “Nobody’s got our back on this. And nothing we do is going to change any of it. Our orders are to play ball.”
Lynch choked down his anger, trying to keep his mind clear. He’d never been Don Quixote, never imagined the world could be perfect. Do the best you can with what you got, that was his compass. This sucked. But he’d always known shit went on outside the lines. Sometimes it was bad shit done for good reasons. Lynch couldn’t stop this, he couldn’t change it. All he could do was try to get some good out of it. Serve and protect, that was the deal. Not the entire free world, just his city. Lynch wanted something for Chicago.
“If I play ball, I want something,” Lynch said.
“What?” Munroe asked.
“I want Corsco.”
Munroe’s smile was back, broad and expansive. “Tell me what you need.”
“Hardin,” Lynch said. “I need to borrow Hardin.”
“Done,” said Munroe. The big man pulled a small digital recorder out of his pocket and tossed it to Lynch. “And I’ll throw this in for free.”
Lynch hit the play button. A little tinny without earbuds, but he could make it out. Munroe jacking up Ringwald and Corsco, Corsco confessing to putting a hit out on Hardin.
“Won’t do you much good in court,” said Munroe, “what with me not existing and all, and I did kinda point a gun at him. Well, shot a gun at him. But if you need it for window dressing, knock yourself out.”
CHAPTER 98
Munroe took his cell out of his pocket. It had been vibrating all through his chat with his Chicago PD buddies, but he didn’t want to take the call, break the rhythm.
He checked the number. The lab. He hit redial.
“What?” he asked.
“We got a problem. The device, it started ticking.”
“What do you mean ticking?”
“It’s got a secondary program. A failsafe. It’s set up to detonate remotely off a cell signal. Looks like al Din had this thing set up so he had to call the cell’s number every day to reset the timer. If he didn’t, then the device starts counting down. Al Din didn’t call today. This sucker is ticking.”
“And you can’t shut it off?”
“No so far.”
“How long?”
“You got till 1730 hours.”
Munroe looked at his watch. Almost 3.00. He had until 5.30. No time, and he didn’t have the manpower on the ground to run any kind of search off the books. He had two plays. Option one, call Starshak back, get Chicago PD on this, give them everything they’d worked out about al Din’s timeline and hope to hell they found these things before they went off. Option two; just let the clock run out. Have to ice the two guys out at Argonne, wouldn’t do to have it get out Uncle Sam had known tens of thousands of Americans were going to die and just sat on his hands. Once he’d heard about the bio angle, Munroe had made some preparations on the QT, had a shit load of Cipro in a National Guard armory up near O’Hare, had a mess of other shit either in town or teed up and ready to wing in on his say so – isolation units, HAZMAT suits, body bags. Had rough outlines for a couple different quarantine scenarios he could ram down the National Guard’s throat if it came to that. Of course, the Guard would only be running things until they could get regular Army in here. And he knew what was in the weapons, the medical confusion they were meant to cause. Be able to get word out so everybody knew exactly what they were dealing with. That meant they’d keep the body count down to the very low end of the projections. Problem being the low end was still around ten thousand – three times as many as 9/11.
Upside would be this. The coverage you’d get. Every talking head in the world doing stand-ups in front of the bodies stacking up in temporary morgues, some ghost town shots of the Loop, CDC guys wandering around in spacesuits, hospitals with beds lining the halls. Couple days of that, Munroe could probably get the President to sign off on nuking Tehran. And the Mexican problem? Tea Party ass hats would have to give up on their border fence. That thing would have to come down so we could get the armor over the border.
He walked over to the window, looked down at the plaza where they had the Calder sculpture. Thing looked like a giant red spider. Town sure did like its funny statues. Lots of people walking back and forth, a mom chasing a couple little ones around the legs of the sculpture, one of the kids giving out a happy squeal loud enough he could just hear it through the glass.
Not much of a shot. Have to get lucky as hell. Sensible thing was to let it play out, cover his tracks. But everybody’s got a line they won’t cross. It’s just that Munroe had never hit it. Was starting to think he didn’t have one. Turned out he did.
The Chicago guys would still be in the building. He called Hickman, told him to round them up and bring them back.
CHAPTER 99
Fifteen minutes later, two hours and twenty minutes to go. Starshak, Lynch, Bernstein and Munroe were on one side of the conference table in the windowless room across from the conference room they’d been in earlier. Hundreds of photos of al Din on the walls. Hardin and Wilson stood across the table. Munroe figured they’d been playing footsie with al Din all week, they might come up with something.
“Most of this is out of our system,” Lynch said.
“Your system and elsewhere,” said Munroe.
“So where was all this when you were supposedly cooperating with us?”
Munroe shrugged. “You really want to waste time on that right now? All this will be over one way or another in a few hours. You wanna step outside then, find out if you’re as big a badass as you think you are, fine.”
Lynch clenched his jaw, nodded, looked down at the pictures.
“Fucker’s been everywhere,” said Starshak. “Got him at Sears Tower, Aon Center, the Hancock. Hell, he’s been in and out of anything over fifty stories at least once. Pretty much every hotel within pissing distance of downtown. Illinois Center, all the pedestrian tunnels in there. It’ll take us a week to search that alone.”
“You’ll want to get into the HVAC centers for the bigger buildings,” said Wilson. “Get the building maintenance guys in there with them, they should know if something’s out of place. He gets one of those to pop into the duct work…”
“Good thought,” Munroe said, looking at her a little sideways.
“My ex was an AC guy,” she said. “Always said if you wanted to gas a building, that was the way to go.”
Starshak made calls, got units headed to the HVAC centers at the bigger targets.
“You sure we shouldn’t be starting an evacuation?” Lynch said.
“No time,” Munroe said. “Besides, evacuate to where? We got pictures of him in,” he picked up a sheet of paper, “Schaumburg, Aurora, Naperville, Joliet, Elgin – pretty much every population center you’ve got in fifty miles out in any direction. Malls, hotels, where you going to send ’em? And cranking up the pedestrian traffic while we’re looking for these things is just going to make it worse. Everything we got that can help is on its way here – drugs, docs, we got quarantine contingencies in place for every option we can think of. You let me worry about the worst case, you worry about finding the damn devices.”
Lynch stared at the pictures. Something was itching at him, and he couldn’t think what. Also, Munroe being in the room was hurting his concentration, because every time Munroe opened his mouth, Lynch wanted to stick a gun in it.
“Munroe, your guys took one of these apart,” Hardin said. “How do they work?”
“How about we have shop class later?” said Starshak.
“Hey, it’s a weapon,” said Hardin. “You understand how it works, then you know how it should be deployed.”
Starshak just nodded. Munroe held up an 11x17 sheet, exploded view based off the device.
“When the time hits zero, a CO2 cartridge is going to blow, rupturing the membrane at the end of the container and shooting the bugs out. This stuff is really fine. A particle of talcum powder is ten microns; all of this is smaller than that. Once it’s out, it’s going to float around very easily. Most of these infections will be through inhalation, but a couple of these agents will work transdermal. So his best bet is a confined space with high pedestrian traffic.”
“Which means he doesn’t have to get these up high to get people to inhale anything,” Bernstein said. “Particles that size, they’ll float around on the air. You could dump it on the floor, it would get kicked up like dust.”
“Yeah,” Munroe said.
“You’re al Din, you want to plant these somewhere public because you want traffic,” Hardin said. “You either have to break in and plant them when a place is closed, which ramps up your risk. Or you have to plant them while people are around.”
“If he was going to risk
a break in, then he’d go for the HVAC system,” said Bernstein. “Maximum damage. Why risk a break in just to stick them somewhere he could hide them during business hours?”
“OK, that makes sense,” Starshak said. “We got people checking HVAC. So how’s he gonna do it if he’s in public? How do we narrow it down?”
“Shoulder to waist,” Munroe said. “Basic tradecraft, like marking a dead drop. He isn’t going to climb up on anything, get down on the floor, bend over, anything that draws attention.”
“Pointed up, I’d guess,” Lynch said. “If airborne is better, then get it airborne. Why wait for people to kick it up?”
Starshak waved his hand. “Best we’re gonna do. So, waist to shoulder height, somewhere he can just reach in quick, probably pointed up.”
Munroe nodded. “Tell your guys to just walk and look, ask themselves where they’d stick something if they had to.”
Starshak relayed the instructions to dispatch.
Bernstein was leaning on the table, looking down at the pictures.
“Something’s fucked up about this,” he said.
“That’s what I thought,” said Lynch. “Just can’t think what.”
Bernstein started picking up pictures at random: al Din in the lobby at the Hyatt, Sox cap on, but a good side angle, green nylon messenger bag on his shoulder. Al Din in the pedestrian tunnel running from City Hall to Macy’s, Bears’ cap this time, still with the messenger bag. He flipped the pictures over to check the dates and times. He picked up another photo. No cap this time, still with the messenger bag, pretty much looking dead into the camera. He flipped it over. Just a number on the back.