Iran? A bigger threat, seeing as the matter of it building its own nukes was really more a question of when than if. More of an issue for Israel, really, but as long as the US still needed a petrochemical tit in its mouth, then the Mideast was always going to be in play and Iran was always going to be a thorn in the side.

But having Mexico as a narco-state neighbor? And one funded by our own dumb-ass appetites? The cartels were driven by money, not ideology. No telling what they’d do to protect and expand their markets, and they’d have virtually unlimited cash to do it with. Anybody with a wallet and a hard on for the US might be able to lease a base of operations a few feet from our soil. And that would turn our second-longest border into a revolving door for a world of trouble.

That wasn’t a problem Munroe could fight, not right now. The War on Drugs? What a crock. Anybody who wasn’t looking at the drug problem through a political lens knew the answer. Legalize every goddamn thing the cartels wanted to sell. Drug prices would plummet, the cartels’ revenue would dry up. Sure, they could try to go legit, but they wouldn’t be having gun fights with each other anymore, they’d be having marketing fights with the cigarette people, the booze people, the Coca-Cola people for all Munroe knew. And there’d be a whole new stream of sin tax revenue to put a dent in the deficit. But the tobacco-sucking, booze-swilling American electorate was convinced that Jesus didn’t like drugs, besides cigarettes and booze.

So the War on Drugs was what Munroe had. Problem being, you don’t fight a war with policemen and warrants and jail terms. You fight a war with planes and tanks and Marines. You don’t send the enemy to jail, you send him to hell. But you couldn’t invade a sovereign nation that was supposedly fighting the same enemy you were just because they sucked at doing the job. Not yet anyway.

Not unless you could invent a reason.

With al Din in play and with Stein dead, Munroe could already make a case that Iran had killed a US citizen on US soil. With this Hardin in the middle of it and with what Munroe knew about how Hernandez held a grudge, Munroe could suck Hernandez into the game as well. Then he could paint the lot of them with the same stink; put the cartels in bed with the terrorists. With the money-laundering angle, Munroe could make the case they were solving each other’s problems. That would be the new narrative.

Then the cartels wouldn’t be drug dealers anymore, they’d be enemy combatants. Then we could lean on Mexico maybe, get them to invite us over the border to help clean house. It wouldn’t take that long. These cartel guys, they aren’t dug in underground like Al Qaeda – Al Qaeda had been born in hiding, it was in their DNA. You had to root them out one at a time like fucking cockroaches. But the cartel bigwigs? They liked their villas. They liked the high life. They weren’t running around free because the Federales didn’t know where to find them. They were running around free because they had the cops, the army, the legislature and the judiciary on their payroll, or enough of them anyway.

Give Munroe a long weekend, a green light, a few dozen drones, and some Navy SEALs and he could decapitate every cartel from the Rio Grande to the Panama Canal. Sure, something would grow back in its place, but Munroe would make damn sure it was our something this time. If you weren’t going to legalize the drug trade, then the best way to protect the nation was to run it.

Munroe was getting ahead of himself, he knew that. Early in the game, still too many loose ends, too many unknowns, and he’d need some buy-in from way above his pay grade. But it was time to start whispering in a few ears.

CHAPTER 24

The next morning, Lynch and Bernstein were watching the show the surveillance guys had pieced together on Hardin on Lynch’s computer. Hardin gets off the plane. Hardin takes the bus to the car rental center. Hardin rents a white Ford Fusion.

They got the plate on that, called the Hertz people. Hardin had used an ID that said he was Nigel Fox. Ran that, Nigel Fox had been at the Hyatt down on Wacker until yesterday. Turned out he was a British newsie Hardin ran with back in Africa. Guy had kicked the bucket a few months back. Ran the plate numbers on the Fusion through the system. Hardin had it parked at the Grant Park garage from maybe forty minutes after Stein got hit until yesterday morning. Then he dropped the car back at the airport, took the L back into town, then jumped a BNSF commuter train to the western burbs. That’s where they lost him. No cameras on the trains, and the train he caught was a local: twenty-five stops between Chicago and Aurora.

“He had to drive back from our South Shore crime scene to the garage, right?” said Lynch. “Just before he took his rental back to the airport? But according to the tape, that rental hasn’t moved since he parked it. So let’s rewind on that, see if we can find the other car.”

They got back on the phone with IT. The entrances to the Grant Park garage were all near Hurley’s Millennium Park, the mayor’s zillion-dollar-over-budget vanity fiasco. It was like some garish nouveau riche attempt to one-up Central Park in ten percent of the space. There was the bandstand that was supposed to be another of Chicago’s architectural marvels but looked pretty much like a beer can that had been blown open with a firecracker. There was the Great Lawn, the one the security guys were always chasing the actual Chicagoans off of because they had to keep the grass nice for when the paying customers from the North Shore came down for the concerts. There was the Bean, a giant, stainless steel kidney bean parked right in the middle. It was supposed to be called Cloud Gate. Lynch remembered the artist getting his knickers in a knot when even the media started calling it the Bean. Lynch wondered what it was about Chicago sometimes – some sense of civic inferiority or something – that made the city break out the checkbook for any artist looking for a payday. You had the Picasso, God knows what that was supposed to be, a winged baboon or something. Across from that, next to the county building, there was what looked like a cement amputee with a fork in her head. You had the red spider down by the Federal Building. Had some white carbuncle in front of the State of Illinois building, looked like a giant wadded-up tissue. What was that thing called again? Monument with Standing Beast? Thing always smelled like urine because it had all these crannies homeless guys and drunks could get into when they had to take a leak. Even had a giant metal baseball bat in the West Loop.

One thing about Millennium Park though, it being Hurley’s baby. It was wired for cameras, wall to wall.

It only took a few minutes. The IT guy pulled up a shot of Hardin ducking into one of the stairwells off Randolph, tracked him back through the park, got him parking a black Grand Marquis on Columbus, behind the Art Institute. They ran that for a while, saw the tickets stacking up and then one of the blue city wreckers hauling it off.

“Looks like the right ride,” said Lynch. He and Bernstein were at the auto pound on lower Randolph, gloves on, taking a first look at the car. The Marquis had some blood on the inside of the right rear door, some on the seat next to it. Also, there was a bullet hole through the front passenger seat. Looked like the round hit the radio.

“Got a shell casing stuck in the seat cushion there,” Bernstein said, pointing.

“So if the gun ever turns up, we can match it. Match the blood to Skinny from down on South Shore, and we got this Hardin guy roped in to that solid.” Lynch popped open the glove compartment, took out a sheet of paper and unfolded it. It was a picture of Hardin at the car rental place at O’Hare – the same picture the tech guys had dug up for Lynch and Bernstein when they’d started running him down. On the bottom, in block printing, was: WHITE FUSION GL4 655 GRANT PARK GARAGE NORTH END.