Munroe nodded. “So we can grab Hardin then. Want to add a little wrinkle, though. Suppose you actually made the deal, this Russian money, where’s it going to look like it came from?”

Lafitpour smiled his thin smile again. “The money will have bounced through several wire transfers at dependable banks in various countries where secrecy is still taken seriously, despite the Justice Department’s recent best efforts. It will appear to have come from thin air.”

“What if I want it to look like it came from somewhere else?’

“Such as?”

“What if I wanted to make it look like it came from Jamie Hernandez?”

“The cartels?”

Munroe nodded.

Lafitpour shrugged. “They are cursed with cash. Of the curses one can have, that’s among the best, of course, but it does complicate their lives. They run so much currency through so many laundries that those of us in the financial game have a pretty good idea of who has been washing what, and where. Yes, I can make the money appear to have come from Hernandez.”

Munroe thought it through. They had the video on al Din; they’d have the diamonds; they’d have Hardin, who could either recite the right lines or his corpse could offer the mute testimony of Munroe’s choosing. It was moving faster than he would have liked. It would be nice to have al Din in the pot too, but Munroe had long since learned about birds in the hand. You have one, you give it a good squeeze, crush the son of a bitch. Hold a live bird in your hand too long, the thing will shit in your palm and fly away. This was probably as good as it was going to get.

“OK,” Munroe said. “I’ll start clipping loose ends. This will have to get official quick though. I need a public face, a behind-the-podium guy. Somebody who can wrap this whole thing up tight in a flag and make the press salute it. This is your town. Suggestions?”

“Alex Hickman. New US attorney in town.”

“He our kind of boy?”

“I have regular dealings with Mr Hickman and have contributed substantially to the political coffers he won’t admit to having as of yet. He’s proven most useful running interference when the SEC gets a little nosy. He is our kind of boy.”

“Can you set up a meet?”

“Lunch at my home tomorrow, shall we say one?”

“You don’t have to check with him?”

Lafitpour smiled. “Once a dog is sufficiently well trained, you no longer have to check when you say come.” Lafitpour took another sip of the wine. “One question. If this is all going to be pitched as some drugs-funding-terrorism deal, could you arrange the snatch at a location other than my office? It would reflect poorly on my business.”

Munroe’s turn to smile. “But why, my friend? You have been working undercover in association with elements of US intelligence for months helping to set up this breakthrough in the War on Terror and the War on Drugs. You will provide the inside knowledge concerning how Al Qaeda, Iran and the cartels are cooperating in their money movement and money laundering. You are an American hero, an Iranian immigrant showing your gratitude to this great nation that is the font of your fortune. Just the sort of guy, when the shit hits the fan and we destabilize the Khamenei regime, state might look at to head over to Tehran and run the place, after the free and fair elections, of course.”

“Of course,” Lafitpour said. “I’d forgotten. But I still take my five million.”

“Fine,” said Munroe. “But you pay for dinner, I can’t afford the wine.”

In the cab back to the hotel, Munroe’s phone pinged – dossier on Tony Corsco. Thought on that a minute. If everything went according to plan, they should have Hardin in the bag within forty-eight hours. But sometimes things didn’t go according to plan. Besides, this business with Hardin and Corsco, it had to be about the diamonds, and Munroe needed to know what kind of word was floating around out there, make sure there were no stray narratives in the mix on game day. Anyway, there was no such thing as too much information or too many assets. So he’d set up a meet with this Corsco fuck. Dossier had a lawyer’s name – Ringwald. Work it through him, make it easier. Munroe figured if he gave the lawyer a sniff of his bona fides, it would grease the skids. And he’d had to lean on the mob before– that Carmelo dick out in New York – so he could play that card if he needed it.

CHAPTER 31

Wilson and Hardin barely made it in the door of her condo. She turned to Hardin, clasped her hands behind his neck, her mouth covering his like it was the only way she could breathe. And then she was opening his shirt, and he was reaching for her belt. When he undid it, the weight of the S&W in the hip holster pulled her pants to the floor, the gun hitting the tile with a thunk, and Hardin said, “Jesus, I hope the safety is on.”

Wilson pulled back for a moment – her eyes on his, sad all of a sudden and a little afraid – and he could see that this was no time for jokes, that she couldn’t take it, not if this didn’t mean to him what it meant to her.

Then his own pants were dropping, and they were both just flesh. She was unfolding herself like a Cubist sculpture, all of her surfaces – thighs, crotch, stomach, chest, mouth – pressing against him desperately, like she wanted somehow for every square inch of her flesh to press against every square inch of his. He felt the naked admission of her hunger, and he remembered all the other women – a girl in high school, the Marine groupies outside Camp Lejeune, a couple of African girls, the Peace Corps volunteer in Lagos, the economics student from the Sorbonne who he imagined for a time he might have loved – and realized that he had been nude with women before but that he had never been naked. He had never surrendered his distance. He had made love from behind his mental battlements, like a sniper, and this time it would be hand-to-hand, mouth-to-mouth. This time it would cost him a piece of himself.

Then they fell onto her bed, and she wrapped her legs around his waist, her feet pressing down onto his buttocks like hands, and she was already wet and hot and open and he was stripped of every pretense, any idea beyond this moment. He felt himself being drawn into her as if he could somehow spill not just his seed but his entire person into her, and he knew this was the beginning of a private religion. It was the moment in which they became each other’s gods.

When they were finished, they both lay on their backs, separate, no longer touching. And then she rolled over, and she took his face in her hands, and she kissed him gently, but for a long time.

“Last time you kissed me like that you were saying goodbye,” said Hardin.

“I’m not going anywhere this time,” she said, rolling off the bed and standing up. “Just to the john.”

Hardin watched her cross the room, the dim light leaking through the Venetian blinds, falling in stripes across her back like the contour lines on a map. Hardin held it in his mind, knowing what a perfect ass would look like if you ever mapped one. He felt the sheen of sweat drying on his skin. All of it turning in his mind, the perfect satisfaction of this moment, the lost years, her brother’s ghost.

Then she came back to him, lying on the bed, no effort to cover her nakedness, her head on his shoulder like a part of him that had been missing his entire life.

He’d told her all of it – Fenn, the blackballing, the diamonds, and everything else from all the lost years. And she told him. Hernandez never came for her. She was just another puta. Her parents had both died within a year, after Esteban. They never came back from that. She couldn’t stand to look at the town anymore. She got in her car one day, started west on 88, turned south on 35 at Des Moines. The car broke down in Wichita. She got a job waitressing, started taking classes at Wichita State, married a guy with a heating and air conditioning business. People couldn’t live without their AC in Wichita. She graduated with a Criminal Justice degree at WSU, hired on with the Wichita PD. Her husband felt emasculated having a cop for a wife, and the marriage came apart pretty quick, mostly because she really didn’t care. She was Jeanette Wilson by then, though. Five years later, she joined the DEA in Texas, three years there, lots of violence, too much violence, had been shipped up to Chicago two years ago.