Lynch took a breath, not sure where to step. “I haven’t talked to Dickey in weeks, first off, so if he’s getting shit, it isn’t coming from me.”
“He’s getting it from somebody.” A little tone in her voice said she wasn’t sure.
“And somebody’s gonna be unhappy when I find out who.” Lynch was pissed now, not needing this. “And I wasn’t calling anybody yesterday on account of I was busy watching my mom die.”
Silence. “Oh Jesus, John, why didn’t you call me?”
Lynch feeling like shit, having put the knife in and no way to take it back.
“Look, I’m sorry, Liz. It was late, I was with my sister. Then I got the callout on this first thing. Probably shouldn’t even be on this. Honest to God, whatever Regan’s getting, it’s not from me.”
“Oh Jesus, Lynch, I guess I knew that. I was just pissed.”
“Look, Riordan’s old man used to run the Red Squad for Hurley the First – might make an angle for you, not that it’s a secret. And you can quote an anonymous source saying it’s the same guy.”
“John, I just… I feel like shit.”
“Me too. Look, I got to go.”
“Yeah. No harm no foul?”
“Sure. We’re good.” Not sure they were.
Lynch thought for a moment after Johnson hung up. No way McCord was leaking shit. Novak. He’d have the info, and he felt right. Lynch scrolled through the directory on his phone, found Regan, hit dial.
“Hey, Lynch,” answered Regan. “Hear you’re sleeping your way through the press corps. Hope you’re not looking to get in my pants, too.”
“Why would I want to when Novak’s already in there?”
Little pause, all Lynch needed to hear. “What the fuck you talking about?”
“Just tell me why I shouldn’t have the asshole canned, Dickey.”
“Canned for what? You ain’t got shit.”
“Got all I need. Better start shopping for a new snitch. I’m shutting his act down.”
“Whatever, Lynch. Hey, saw the video feed from the Riordan shoot. Like the Kojak look. You just need a little lollipop.”
“Fuck you, Dickey.”
“Right back at you. You gotta buy me lunch soon.”
CHAPTER 36 – CHICAGO
Cunningham ran steadily along the bike path by the lake shore. Cool night, breeze out of the north pushing a little drizzle. Kind of night that kept the crowds down. Kind of night Cunningham liked. And the running helped him think.
It was a 54mm casing, that was the thing. Only one long gun Cunningham knew of chambered a 54. The Dragunov SVD. Standard Soviet sniper rifle starting back in Nam and for a while after. Not really a top-drawer weapon. It was based on the AK-47, even looked like a stretch version of one. Meant more for infantry support. Have one guy in the weapons squad, train him up, he can give a unit longer-range capability. But, even with training, five hundred yards was good with the Dragunov. Now you got some guy taking two targets dead through the ten ring, one from nearly six hundred, the other from better than seven hundred. And he was saboting his rounds, which wasn’t making the shot any easier.
That, and even through the plastic bag, Cunningham could tell the casing wasn’t off-the-shelf. Somebody had taken some time on the neck, turning it, making sure the slug would get a nice, clean release. No way to tell in the time he had, but he’d bet the primer hole had been deburred as well.
So a pro. Knew that already. But the Dragunov? Not the type of thing a pro would choose.
Except one.
You didn’t spend twenty years playing scout/sniper for the Corps without getting out some. Cunningham had been out some. Wondered one time if he could get through the whole alphabet – Angola, Beirut, Cambodia, Djibouti... Sometimes things you might hear about on the news – Lebanon, Somalia. Most of the time, though, places nobody’d ever know he’d been, doing stuff nobody’d ever know he’d done. Sometimes you were wearing the uniform, lots of times you weren’t. Lots of times you were dressed up like a Bedouin getting chauffeured around Eritrea in a twenty-year-old Land Cruiser by some guy who said he was Agency for International Development, except he was packing a 9mm with custom grips and had Agency stink on him so bad you couldn’t get it out with a bottle of Febreze.
OK, so Cunningham wasn’t a super-spook. Most of his fun and games, that had been early on. Usually in Africa cause a kaffir who can shoot, there’s always a place for one on the dark continent. But Cunningham, he’d done a few things. And he hung around guys who’d done a few things. And these guys, you’d trust them with your life – hell, trust them with your daughter, even if she was liquored up. So he’d heard things.
And he’d heard about the Dragon.
First time was around 1980, just when Afghanistan was heating up for the Reds. Arms dealer in Peshawar named Abdul the Fat, an honest one, which pretty much made him Mother Teresa in that neighborhood. You name it, he could get it. SAMs, Stingers, C4, Claymores, M-whatevers, from Garands to 14s to 16s to 81s. Probably had more Lee-Enfields in his shop than the Brits had in the Raj when Kipling was stomping around. You made a deal, it stayed made. You set a price, it stayed set. Didn’t matter if you were Mujahideen, Ivan the Red, some Agency puke, a Kurd with a bug up your ass. Abdul the Fat was the honest broker, the market-maker for mayhem. Among certain circles, he was probably the best-loved man between Riyadh and Delhi.
What Cunningham heard was the Agency wanted Abdul the Fat out so that the Islamic whackos who were getting their rocks off playing with the Ruskies would have to get out of the open market and start swapping their unswerving fealty to US policies for every case of bang-bangs the US could send their way. But leaving Uncle Sam’s fingerprints on Abdul the Fat’s corpus delecti would be beaucoup bad PR. So the Agency pukes, they set up a trap for this Russian Spetsnaz shooter who’d been leaving lots of dead Mullahs around the Hindu Kush. They took him out real quiet-like, and they turned his Dragunov over to this hot-shit trigger jockey who had earned his bones doing really whacked-out shit in Nam the last couple of years. So this guy pops Abdul the Fat right in the middle of a handoff to some of the local ragheads. Slug gets tied to the same barrel that’s been leaving the dead Mullahs all over, the whole thing gets charged to Moscow’s account, and the Agency corners the market on selling arms to Fundamentalist Islam – which, and this was the part Cunningham had to admit got hard to believe, actually seemed like a good idea at the time. Typical Langley three-rail shot.
OK. So that was so much fun, they start using the same gun and the same guy on lots of hits that make the Politburo look like they have their heads up their zhopas. He plugs some Solidarity guy in Gdansk, pretty much handing the keys to the Warsaw White House to Walesa. Couple dozen hits on priests and other lefty troublemakers in a fruit salad of banana republics in Central America. People start calling the guy the Dragon. Thinking is he’s Soviet, or ex-Soviet, but either way he’s got Ivan seeing, well, red.
Then the wheels came off the Big Red Machine. Nobody needed a fake Russian anymore. But the shooter? He gets some weird religious attachment to his Dragunov. He is doing God’s work, and the Dragunov is God’s instrument – some such shit, like it’s Excalibur or something.
Dead guys start turning up with clean rounds in em. No rifling, no nothing. Word among the Fort Campbell types was that the Dragon was saboting his rounds so he could keep using his toy.
And now you got people pierced by magic bullets turning up outside churches in Chicago. You got a 54mm casing that somebody who loves bullets more than he loves his mother has honed like a fucking scalpel. And Cunningham had to decide what he was going to say and to whom.
On the one hand, it was a no-brainer. Cunningham was a cop and anyway you sliced it, this was murder. On the other hand, Cunningham had, by the legal definition, murdered people before – and done so on the orders of the sort of people who might be ordering these kills, if it really was the Dragon at work.