Munroe nodded, keeping his eyes on Hickman. It looked like he had the stomach for the job. “Let’s find Hardin and Wilson, make it sloppy, make it look like Hernandez. Give my guys five minutes with the crime scene and we can hang it on him solid. We let the Feds make the bust on Hernandez. Bigger name anyway. Everybody wins.”

“OK,” Hickman said again.

“That’s Plan B then. Bahram, get back to this Fouche, tell him we’re ready to go. Plan C is this – keep the money together and ready to move. Turns out we have to make a deal with Hardin, then we do.”

“Plan C?” Hickman asked. “How many plans are we going to need?”

“Someday when I know you better, ask me about Plan Q,” Munroe said.

Lafitpour chuckled like he was reliving a happy memory. “That poor bastard.”

Munroe had one more asset to line up. He called the phone he’d left with Tony Corsco.

“Jesus,” Corsco answered. “You know what time it is?”

“Time for you to answer the phone,” said Munroe. “You got anything on Hardin yet?”

“We’re working on it. I get anything, you’ll now first thing.”

“Let me update your orders a little. Intel’s still fine. I hear what you hear as soon as you hear it. But if Hardin happens to end up dead, let’s just say that’s fine, too.”

“You putting a contract on him?” Corsco asked.

“Contract is when somebody pays you,” Munroe said. “I’m just saying intel’s fine, but if that intel happens to be where to find his body, so much the better.”

CHAPTER 53

Brad Jablonski tossed a manila folder on Starshak’s desk. He’d already sent what he had over to Hickman. Now, he’d stopped by to update Chicago PD.

“Jeanette Wilson used to be Juanita Sandoval,” Jablonski said. “Right there in our HR files from when she signed up down in Texas. Maiden name and everything.”

“Sandoval as in the guy with Hardin back when he took out Hernandez’s kid brother?” Lynch asked.

“Yeah,” said Marks. “His sister.”

“This never bothered anybody?” Starshak asked.

Marks shrugged. “Should somebody have made the connection? Yeah, I guess. Thing is? It was all legit when she signed on. Changed her name when she married, then got a divorce. She came out of the Wichita PD, they vetted her then. Degree was out of Wichita State. We get a Hispanic female recruit, looks Mexican, talks Mexican, maybe we didn’t look at her teeth quite as hard as we could have. I mean, she should have said something. She’d be in deep shit for that if she wasn’t pretty much buried in shit already.”

“So she’s been after Hernandez all along?” Bernstein asked.

“Looks like,” said Marks. “She signed up in Texas, which is as close to him as she could get, and she was one hard-ass operator down there. No secret we run a lot of ops across the border, working with the Mexicans. She signed up for that first chance she got, and they loved her. I mean a female across the Rio Grande that could pass for native? That whole macho thing? Bad guys never even looked at her. Thing is, down there? Nowadays, pretty much every bust ends up in a fire fight, which is always a little exciting for the good guys because you never know when one of the people you went through the door with is going to switch teams and shoot you in the back. She had half a dozen kills in Mexico before she got so hot that the Federales said no mas and the brass decided we needed to move her away from the border.”

“Sounds like this Jones kid drew down on the wrong senorita,” Lynch said.

“Yeah,” said Jablonski.

“But she and Hardin go back,” said Lynch.

Jablonski nodded.

“I’m getting old,” said Starshak. “So lemme just recap here, make sure I’m keeping this straight. We got Hardin, who ain’t really Hardin, who ripped off some diamonds from Al Qaeda or maybe Hezbollah, and he wants to sell them. We got Mr .22, sword of whatever, who’s after Hardin and racking up a body count like he’s Chuck Norris. We got Wilson, who ain’t really Wilson, who’s after Hernandez. Hernandez has a hard on for Hardin. Hardin is with Wilson and maybe after Hernandez too, for all we know. Corsco’s got some kind of angle we can’t make out, except it involves Joe Hollywood, who is currently impersonating a houseplant up at Northwestern. We got some suits in from DC nobody knows, and Bernstein here thinks at least one of them is really from Tel Aviv. I missing anything here?”

“Well,” said Bernstein, “there’s that Lee guy, out in Aurora, who it turns out was watching our TV.”

“Right,” said Starshak. “There’s that. Thoughts?”

“Fucked up,” said Lynch.

Starshak got up, picked up the spray bottle off his credenza, and started spritzing the fern in his window.

“So you’re the one coordinating with Hickman on this,” he said to Jablonski. “Couple days ago you were gonna put out a BOLO on Hardin, now we’re sitting on our hands. Why aren’t you putting the full-court press on him and Wilson? Looks like they had to leave town in a hurry. She can’t use her ID, access her accounts, nothing. Hardin’s blown the Fox ID he was using, can’t go back to Hardin, can’t go back to Griffin. They’ve gotta be hiding somewhere. We get them on the wire, get their faces up on the tube, we probably get a line on them pretty quick.”

“That’s how I’d play it,” Jablonski said. “But Hickman doesn’t want to spook them. He says Hardin takes his diamonds and runs, we might never find them. Say he’s worried Al Qaeda will get their hands on them again, which would give the bad guys better than a hundred mil in operating capital. We leave Hardin and Wilson some room, maybe they make a play on Hernandez, maybe we find this al Din, maybe they try to make another sale we can track. If you push him on it, he starts making national security noises, playing the need to know card.”

“So now he’s worried about what the terrorists might be up to?” Starshak said. “Yesterday he couldn’t shut me up on that fast enough.”

“Hickman’s got some kind of angle he’s not telling us,” said Lynch. “Cause he’s not stupid and that doesn’t make sense.”

“What I figured,” said Jablonski.

After Jablonski left, Starshak, Lynch and Bernstein talked things over.

“Can’t just sit on our fucking hands,” Lynch said. “What about Corsco? He’s tied in here somewhere, and he’s still ducking us. I say it’s time to sit his ass down.”

Starshak nodded, reached for the phone, called Ringwald, told him to have Corsco in for an interview today or Starshak would get a subpoena and serve it on the mother fucker in his box at the opera. He hung up.

“What else?” he asked.

“With these need-to-know fed types in this, they’re gonna freeze us out,” said Lynch. “This crap from Hickman on the BOLOs, that’s just the start.”

“Agreed,” said Bernstein.

A pause in the conversation. “So what’s our move?” Starshak asked.

“So we focus on Saturday,” said Lynch.

“Why the African?” asked Starshak.

“This al Din fuck, he’s the one leaving bodies behind. And Saturday, that’s the one move he couldn’t have planned in advance. If he fucked up, he fucked up there. I’m going to go talk to Magnus again, see if I can shake something loose.”

CHAPTER 54

Kate Magnus was out front, working in the flower garden along the fence with a few of the residents when Lynch got to the shelter. As he pulled up, he saw a young black kid on the other side of the street wave back between a couple of the three-flats up that way and then turn and jog away from the street, cutting back between the buildings. Lookout, probably. Running a street market.

Magnus was wearing jeans today, what looked like a long-sleeve T-shirt of some kind under a cheap nylon windbreaker. Lynch didn’t think she spent much on clothes. Lynch didn’t think she gave a shit about that either. She stood up when she saw him, took off her work gloves, said something to one of the men working near her and walked over to meet Lynch at the gate.