“Then I guess we’re in the right place,” Munroe said. “What did Fouche want?”
“Recent events have emboldened our fugitives. Between the rather colorful news coverage and the desultory effort being made to pursue them, they have discerned our plans, at least in broad outline. Hardin knows we need him and his diamonds to make it work. Fouche says that Hardin is happy to play along, but he is having some trust issues.”
“I’d be having some myself,” said Munroe. “We can always buy a little trust. Everything has its price.”
“Price was mentioned. They want $25 million now. It seems they also have a kilogram of Hernandez’s cocaine, and they are willing to throw that in.”
“The blow will help,” Munroe said. “Window dressing on the Hernandez side of things. Push back on the number a little. We cave too easy, it’ll smell funny. But settle for whatever you gotta settle for. Just get us a meet. “
“I thought you were tapped out at fifteen,” said Hickman.
“I am,” Lafitpour said.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Munroe. “Comes down to an actual deal, we show up with the $15 million, they’ll take it, trust me. Right now, I just need them somewhere I can get a scope on them.”
“I will get back to Fouche,” said Lafitpour.
Munroe looked at Hickman. Hickman was looking thoughtful.
“What?” Munroe asked.
“It’s Wilson,” said Hickman, “She may have queered us snatching up Hardin, but putting her in the mix really tightens up our story, especially now that we got her toting some blow around.”
“How?” asked Munroe.
“We got their back story now, her and Hardin. Old lovers. That will all check out, anybody digs into it. Now we got him coming out of Africa with the diamonds, not too hard to make the case for an Al Qaeda connection there. And we have her coming out of the DEA with a kilo of coke, so we can make her dirty, tie her to the cartel. Them running around together, that bakes them right into the deal. They end up dead? Hey, bad guys meet up, and it goes to guns. Shit happens.”
Munroe smiled at Hickman. “So we still pin it on Hernandez, but we paint Hardin and Wilson with the dirty brush, take the sympathy card away. I like it. People think they’re with the bad guys, they’ll dig at it less.” Munroe smiled at Lafitpour. “You were right about this guy, Bahram. He’s our kind of people.”
CHAPTER 60
A small line of blood ran down the boy’s forehead, veering left at the bridge of his nose, dripping from the jaw line onto his T-shirt. Al Din tried to place the character on the shirt. Iron Man, that was it. The movie had been heavily promoted. Al Din waited for the woman to stop struggling against the duct tape that held her to the chair, to stop trying to scream through the gag. The girl’s eyes were still open, but she was not moving. Shock, probably. He saw all the resistance go out of the man’s face. Always start with the boy, al Din had learned. Men had this strange willingness to sacrifice their sons. So he always preserved the illusion that they could save their daughters.
Ringwald lived in a large, modern house on a two-acre lot in Highland Park. The house had very good locks and one of the better electronic home protection systems, but the large lot meant that no one could see al Din from the street, and, with time, locks and electronic systems were meaningless. The large lot also meant the neighbors would not hear what happened in the house. Once al Din had defeated the system and the locks, he gathered the family and duct taped them to the four chairs from the kitchen table, arranging them in a semi-circle, Ringwald on his left, then the daughter, then the wife, Ringwald’s son facing him directly from the right.
Of course Ringwald would not answer the questions at first. Al Din did not expect him to. In fact, did not want him to. Al Din wanted an initial token of resistance that he could meet with complete brutality. That would break the man’s will. Then al Din would know that the man spoke the truth. So, once the family was in place, al Din asked a pointless question, allowed Ringwald to say no.
And then al Din shot the young boy through the forehead.
“Completely unnecessary,” he then said, turning to Ringwald. “Now you have killed your son. Are you ready to answer my questions? If not, do I shoot your wife or your daughter next? Really, no one else has to die. Will you answer my questions now?”
Ringwald nodded.
“You are Mr Corsco’s attorney?”
“Yes,” Ringwald said.
“What is his business with Nick Hardin?”
“Hardin used to work in Africa. They had that big charity thing there for Darfur a few years back?”
“I remember,” said al Din.
“He was the guy that punched Shamus Fenn in the face. Fenn knows Corsco pretty well. When he saw Hardin in Chicago, he snapped. He came to Tony to put a hit out on Hardin.”
“Shamus Fenn, the movie actor?” al Din asked.
“Yes,” said Ringwald.
“And he wanted Hardin killed because Hardin hit him in the nose?”
“It screwed up his career,” said Ringwald.
“It has nothing to do with the diamonds?”
“What diamonds? Why does everyone keep asking about diamonds?” Ringwald asked.
There was no pause when al Din asked about the diamonds, no sign of recognition. The man would not lie now.
“What about Hernandez? What is Corsco’s involvement with him?”
“Hardin killed his brother. Years ago. It’s why Hardin left the country. I don’t know why he came back, but Hernandez heard about it. He wanted Tony to help track Hardin down. Which was fine with us. It doesn’t matter how Hardin dies. Fenn would have had to pay off on the contract either way.”
“You said would have had to pay. Because this Fenn overdosed on drugs, he can no longer pay you?”
“Fenn fucked up, went on TV, drew some attention to himself, this whole thing with him and Hardin. The police were talking to him, he was getting nervous. Tony took care of that, cutting his losses.”
“Corsco and Hernandez, they are colleagues?”
Ringwald didn’t answer. He was looking at the boy, his eyes vacant. Al Din tapped him on the head with the barrel of the pistol.
“Focus. While your wife and daughter are still alive. Are Corsco and Hernandez colleagues?”
“No, they pretty much hate each other. Drugs are a minor revenue stream for Corsco, but there are overlaps between his operations and the local cartel distributors. So they have to cooperate to a degree.”
Al Din had what he needed. There was nothing more to learn here. What was the phrase Ringwald had used? Cutting his losses. Al Din liked that phrase. He would have to remember it. It was time to cut his losses.
He shot the woman first. She was an innocent; there was no reason she should have to watch her daughter die. The girl gave no sign she even noticed. Al Din shot her next.
Ringwald was straining against his bonds now, gasping, starting to scream. But not for long.
Al Din shook his head. Corsco wasn’t interested in the diamonds at all, didn’t even know about them. He was hired to kill Hardin because a movie star got punched in the nose. Al Din turned and left without even looking at the corpses taped to the chairs around him. The strange reasons why people had to die no longer surprised him.
CHAPTER 61
Back at the Hilton, Munroe set down a heavy document, took off his glasses and rubbed his nose for a minute. This Heinz guy, the bug herder who’d turned up dead out west, Langley got the goods on him.
A MULTI-VECTOR APPROACH TO BIOLOGICAL WARFARE: DEGRADING PUBLIC HEALTH RESPONSE THROUGH SIMULTANEOUS DISPERSION OF MULTIPLE INFECTIOUS AGENTS
by DR MARK HEINZ.
The paper was a couple hundred pages long, full of charts and graphs and some really horrible pictures, but the main point was clear enough.
By dispersing several virulent bugs simultaneously, you could first delay consensus on what agent a target community was dealing with because of the overlap in symptomology among the various diseases and their varying incubation periods. Hospitals would initially report conflicting test results. The community’s ability to respond would be degraded by the sheer number of cases, their diversity, the compounding effects of continuing infections, and the fact that most of their health care workers would likely be infected with one agent or another by the time they figured out what they were dealing with. Even then, they would be able to treat only a fraction of the infected persons because of the varied list of drugs required, most of which were in limited supply because none of the diseases were common. The paper had several simulations outlining casualty scenarios based on varying delivery vehicles, population densities, and response strategies. Even the most optimistic would lap the body count from 9/11 several times over.
This paper had been Heinz’s big claim to fame down at Fort Dix, and he’d been pretty passionate about it. A little too passionate for some of his peers. He had a rep as a cold fish who was a little too fond of his bugs. Langley had put Heinz through the ringer, run down his old cronies, checked him out. Munroe flipped through the transcripts of the conversations, found a quote that set off some alarm bells in his head:
You have to understand that, for most of us, this job is a non-stop horror show. Every day we’re working on ideas to contain some truly nasty stuff. And we do it so that someday we aren’t in biohazard suits walking through some American town watching people die and knowing there isn’t much we can do about it. But Heinz? You never got that vibe from him. You always got this feeling that, if the shit ever really hit the fan, he’d be trying to wrangle a seat on the first chopper in just so he could watch.
On the other hand, Heinz’s record was spotless. Honorable discharge once he hit his twenty years, solid career with one of the big pharma companies after, and everybody there thought the guy was just swell. Of course, he had been the brainchild behind one of those boner pills that made the joint a few hundred zillion dollars, so everybody they talked to probably owed Heinz for half the bounce in their stock options.
But Heinz had always been a lab guy, not a C-suite player. Good money, but not Bill Gates money. They’d pulled his finances apart, and if you plugged everything into a spreadsheet, then this Heinz wasn’t living beyond his means, not so that you could prove it. But he was living on the edge. The very edge. And the last couple years, when the economy had tanked and everybody else in the world had pulled their belt in a couple notches, Heinz had gone right on spending.
Nothing you could take to court, but it sure felt like he’d picked up an extra income somewhere. So that had Munroe suspicious. That and Heinz showing up dead. Dead guys always made Munroe’s nose twitch.
CHAPTER 62
The next morning, Lynch and Bernstein were out in Aurora.
“Nice place,” Lynch said. He and Bernstein were shaking hands with Perez in the lobby of the new Aurora PD headquarters. Bright, airy, lots of windows, more like some corporate HQ than a cop shop.
“Yeah,” said Perez. “Just moved in a couple months back. You don’t get the nice digs in the city?”
“Asbestos, lead paint, Seventies linoleum,” said Bernstein. “All the modern conveniences.”
Perez wound them through the building back to Jenks’ station. The IT guy. Black slacks today, expensive-looking white shirt, some kind of linen thing but without the wrinkles. Jenks walked them through what he had.
“First, you gotta understand we’re going to be pulling this apart for months,” said Jenks. “He didn’t keep much on his local drives – looks like just whatever he had cooking at the time – but he was a bitch for backups. Had a floor safe, pretty high-end piece we had to cut. Backups going back three years. Just scratched the surface on those.” Jenks pulled out a file from a drawer, set it on the desk. “Start of an inventory in there. He had the backups sorted by the name of the subject he was tracking.”
“OK,” said Lynch. “What about these shots of Hardin?”
“He had three Hardin files,” said Jenks, “and pretty much the same stuff in all of them. So he had three customers interested in the guy, and he was just reselling the intel.”
“Can you tell who the customers were?” Lynch asked.
“I can tell where he sent the stuff,” said Jenks. He clicked at his terminal for a minute. “OK, here’s customer number one. Gmail account in the name of John Smith, so that’s bullshit, right? But I looked at the IP addresses where this account pulled down the data Lee sent. You get a few outliers, but mostly you get the Starbucks downtown at Wells and Madison and you get another Starbucks up in Highland Park. So whoever it is, they’re making an effort to say off the grid, keeping it public so you can’t tie it to them.”
“Not trying hard enough,” said Bernstein. “Gerry Ringwald’s office is across the street from one of these Starbucks, and he lives in Highland Park.”
“Who’s Ringwald?” asked Jenks.
“Corsco’s lawyer,” said Lynch. “Any way we can tie it to him more directly?”
Jenks shrugged. “He’s working remote – could be a laptop, could be a cell phone, could be an iPad or something. If he still has the device he did the download with, then I might be able to tie the data to the box. Might even find the files on there.”
“OK,” said Lynch. “Who else you got?”
“Customer number two, the first few hits were in Juárez, so you have to figure that’s Hernandez. Then those start bouncing around. Picked up mail here in Aurora a couple of times, a couple spots in Chicago, all around the area. They’re moving around, sticking to public access Wi-Fi, so I can’t track this back to any base of operations.”
“Same deal?” asked Lynch. “We catch them with the right laptop, we can tie them in?”
“Yeah,” said Jenks. “Now, customer number three. This guy’s picking up his mail all over the 19th arrondissement.”
“The what?” asked Lynch.