CHAPTER 65

Al Din’s phone pinged. He opened the text from Tokyo. A photo of a large, older man entering the Hilton hotel on Michigan Avenue.

The Americans had sent Munroe.

If Munroe was in town, then al Din had to assume he was getting close. Time to switch IDs. He checked out of his hotel, drove to O’Hare, returned his rental car, took a shuttle to the terminal, took another to a different rental car vendor, rented a new car under a new name and then headed west, away from the city. Munroe would check the city first. Then he would look near the Interstate highways.

North Avenue was a busy arterial street between Interstate 90 to the north and Interstate 88 to the south. Lots of traffic, lots of stoplights, not an easy place to get away from quickly. That made it a bad choice, which, with Munroe looking for him, made it a good choice.

Al Din found what he wanted – an inexpensive motel with an odd name, not one of the national chains. He checked in. It was late, he was tired, but he was also hungry. He walked across the parking lot to an anonymous tavern.

As soon as he walked in the door, he could feel the emotional buzz of a group sharing some significant experience. Then there was a loud roar from the back of the room. Al Din turned. A basketball game, probably part of this college tournament he’d been hearing talked about all week, this March madness. The team from the University of Illinois had progressed to one of the final rounds and the game was on.

Al Din flashed back to his last trip to the US. He had walked into another bar at almost exactly this time of night, that time in Cleveland, Ohio. The dozen or so people in the bar were not scattered at their separate tables, but were all standing in front of the large television at the back of the room. The American president was on, announcing that Osama bin Laden was dead. The Americans had tracked him to a compound in Pakistan and killed him.

As al Din listened to the tone of the coverage and felt the cathartic reaction of the people in the bar, he realized he had completely misread something in the American character. He’d seen the previous American president standing in the rubble in New York swearing those responsible would be brought to justice. He had heard the same hollow boasts from others over the years, the new president, senators, and congressmen. But he had assumed that it was merely rhetoric. That what really mattered was the pretense the attacks provided, the opportunity it had given the Americans to pursue their aims in Iraq and in Afghanistan. In fact, al Din had long assumed that the Americans had no real interest in catching Bin Laden. They had severed him from his network, so he personally was not a threat. And he served a useful purpose as the monster that inflamed their electorate, a name those in power could always use to manipulate opinion. Al Din prided himself on mastering idiom and recalled the word he was looking for. Boogeyman. Osama bin Laden had been America’s Boogeyman.

But Al Din had been wrong. They had never stopped looking. His opinion of the United States hadn’t been shaped by the sort of people in this bar; it had been shaped by men like Munroe. But for the average American, for the electorate whose favor those seeking power must court, Bin Laden made things simple. One man who, with his robes and turban and beard and hooked nose, could be made the face of Islam, could be the enemy. With him as a fetish, a totem, the American people didn’t even have to try to digest the real picture – the rage of the unemployed young masses in most of the Muslim world. The inbred sense of some historical injustice as they considered the previous grandeur of the Caliphate ground beneath the Crusaders’ heels. The Jewish state forced into their midst by the West, even after the West had spent centuries persecuting the Jews. The differences between Sunni and Shi’a, the distinction between secular and religious motivations. Bin Laden was the distillation for all of it, a way to make the complex simple. He reduced an equation involving centuries of history, dozens of cultures, differing religions and competing worldviews into one of their cowboy movies. Good guys and bad guys in the street with guns.

And so America, the most powerful nation on Earth, had spared no effort, no expense, no technical wizardry or human sacrifice in their obsession to find Bin Laden. Even with his fortune, his international network, the open support of the Taliban, the tacit support of Pakistan, the ambivalent support of the Saudis, even with all of those advantages, he could not hide forever.

Al Din stood now in a different bar feeling a crowd of Americans reacting to a basketball victory in much the same way the crowd in Cleveland had reacted to news of Bin Laden’s death and realized that, if Bin Laden could not hid forever, then neither could he.

With Bin Laden dead, if al Din completed the New Mexico project, the Americans would need a new face of evil. As Tehran’s puppet, its cut-out, as the face at the end of the money trail, al Din would be it. He would be the new Boogeyman, In fact, MOIS would make sure of it, was already making sure of it. That explained the delay in paying him. Tehran would tie the money from the diamonds directly to al Din and al Din directly to Al Qaeda.

Al Din had never considered America to be his enemy, just his target. And he had never considered MOIS or Al Qaeda or Hezbollah to be his friends, just his clients. He had no mission but his own wealth and his own survival. Now it seemed that the best way to preserve both would be to switch sides.

He would make a deal with Munroe. And he would retire in the West, a rich man instead of a hunted one, secure from any threat his betrayal might bring from his current masters, because the Americans, the most powerful nation on Earth, would now be working to ensure his safety instead of his death.

That was his plan, anyway. But it would be a ticklish business. Munroe would value his cooperation. It was clear from the political rhetoric al Din was hearing in the American media that Munroe was using his knowledge of the diamonds and some other angle that al Din did not understand to create a new axis of evil, this one running from the Mexican drug cartels to Bin Laden’s corpse. Al Din could give Munroe a way to add Tehran to that axis. The only question was whether Munroe would prefer that al Din cooperate as an ally or as a corpse.

Corpses were much easier to manage.

In the meantime, he would continue to look for Hardin. He would recover the diamonds, not for Tehran, but for himself.

CHAPTER 66

Corsco slammed the door, his face red.

His home. That cop, that fuck Lynch, had the balls to turn up at his home. Show up with his little Jew in tow; brace him in front of his family. Of course Lynch couldn’t have exactly called Ringwald and set something up, Corsco knew that now.

Corsco didn’t give them shit, of course. Couldn’t, even if he wanted to. Corsco had no clue what was going on. Ringwald? Why? Over what? Sounded like a pro – .22s, close range. Lynch told him that much, probably trying to shake him up, which he had.

One of the other families? But why Ringwald? Why give Corsco that kind of heads up if they were coming after him? Hernandez maybe, over this Hardin shit? But again, why the lawyer? And .22s weren’t Hernandez’s style. He’d have gone in with a chainsaw. This Hardin puke? Did he hear something; figure he could get information out of Ringwald?

Too many fucking questions.

But whatever the hell was going on, he had the cops up his ass like a big-fisted proctologist, which means they’d be digging hard at anything they could get their mitts on. And one of those things was Fenn. Fucking actor, should’ve known he’d have some kind of cocaine immunity.