“So let’s do that.”
“What I hear, it is all cleaned up, or close to it. What I hear, I don’t gotta worry. I got friends. What I hear, you’ve been losing yours.”
“You know what your friends are doing?”
“Don’t wanna know.”
“Sure you do. That’s why you’re talking to me, that and when Paddy Wang talks, your lips move. Your friends kidnapped a cop and are going to kill him and frame him for murder. Your friends are planning to sacrifice an innocent woman tomorrow just to help clean up your mess. Your friends think they’re the smartest guys in the room, that this is all gonna break your way. But here I am, twelve hours before game time, and I’m telling you isn’t. Your friends are going to be dead or up to their eyeballs in indictments by the end of the week. All this shit from 1971, it’s coming out. You can’t stop it. Your press guy is already getting the calls, and you’re sitting up here with your head up your ass. Your buddy the president is a dead man walking. I know it. More importantly, Wang knows it. Hell, Clarke probably even knows it. We are less than twenty-four hours from the biggest political scandal in this country’s history. You can be on one side of it or the other. We both know what you are, Hurley. You’re a cowardly piece of chicken shit like your grandfather. You’re always going to be that. But right now, you’ve got a chance to decide what you’re gonna look like, and that’s what you really care about.”
Hurley stood with his back to Lynch still looking out the window. Lynch expected a reaction, he got nothing.
“And what do you care about, Lynch?” Hurley asked.
“I care about ending this without being an accessory to murder.”
Still Hurley didn’t move. For a long time he didn’t speak.
CHAPTER 62 – CHICAGO
Weaver sat at the table in the breakfast nook at the back of Manning’s first-floor condo with the three guys he’d picked for the entry team. Out the window, he could see the white cargo van. Cunningham was locked in the body box in the back, ready to go. Weaver didn’t know how far he could trust the shooters he’d shaken out of the president. He had the Israelis, a bunch of CIA paras, couple of contract guys. When they got their radar read, they’d shoot up Fisher’s hide. That’d feel like a straight-up job to most of these guys. But they had no idea how far out in the breeze the president had hung their asses, and Weaver did. If things got hinky, they’d have to blast their way out – and that would mean shooting cops, civilians, whoever got in the way. And the loaners, they weren’t going to play for those stakes.
But the entry team was his – long-time InterGov, and all of them with more than enough blood on their hands to know where they stood if things went south. When Fisher took his shot, Weaver was going with the entry team, to be with them personally to handle the dirty work with Cunningham. Besides, he wanted to see that fucking Fisher dead himself. So he was keeping these boys with him. If things got dirty, these boys would get dirty with it.
It had gone harder than they figured, getting the confession out of Manning, but they had it. He hadn’t iced her yet, had her drugged up, on the bed in the room toward the front. Too late to dispose of her now and still have time to clean up the mess. They’d pack her out after, take care of it then. If it came to it, they could use her as a hostage.
Brown walked back into the kitchen.
“You got the player?” Weaver asked.
She pulled the small digital device from her pocket and waved it at him. Weaver looked her over one last time. She was dressed in Manning’s clothes, hair matched perfectly. With the make-up, she was almost a dead ringer.
“You ready?”
Brown nodded. “Let’s rock and roll.”
Weaver clicked on his comm unit. “Brown is rolling. Ping me as soon as she’s in the church and we’ll fire up the radars.”
Through his scope, Ishmael Fisher watched Andrea Manning leave her condo and walk toward the church. It was almost over now. They were near, he had seen signs, but it didn’t matter. He was not where they would expect him to be. He would get his shot. After was after.
He felt an intense love for Manning as he watched her walk toward the church, grateful that he would be the instrument that would deliver her to paradise. His right hand worked the beads of his rosary. The Joyful Mysteries.
Cunningham lay in the body box working his left wrist. Most of the last two days were a blur at best. But the drugs had worn off that morning, and they hadn’t shot him up again. Came to strapped to a bed in his shorts, leather cuffs lined with wool on his wrists and ankles. Somebody didn’t want to leave marks. Four guys had come down shortly after, carrying some camo gear.
“Time to get dressed, big boy.” It was the FedEx guy.
They only loosened one cuff at a time, slipping his arms and legs into the fatigues, rolling him around on the bed. Worst thing about it was that they’d done it before, they had a process. Cunningham tried to fight, but it was no good. They pulled his boots on him one at a time. They unfastened the wrist cuffs from the bed, clipped them together. Did the same with the leg cuffs. Someone came in with a dolly, a big packing box on it, the thing FedEx guy had had in the lobby of his place. They set that down on the floor and flipped up the lid. It was foam lined, with clips for the restraints attached to the sides.
“Time for a little ride.” FedEx guy again.
They lifted him by his arms and legs, set him into the box, then clipped the restraints to the sides. When they snapped the lid shut, Cunningham knew they hadn’t spotted their mistake. While they were dressing him, he’d bent the fingers on his left hand and grabbed the sleeve of the fatigue shirt, pulling the fabric up over his wrist. The fabric was fairly thick. It was trapped between the wool lining of the cuff and his wrist. Not much, but probably enough. Cunningham kept working the wrist, feeling a little more give each time.
Ferguson and Jenks were under the big AC unit on the roof of the building across from St Mary’s, covered by a tarp, their rifles barely protruding.
“Here she comes,” said Ferguson, watching Manning leave her building. Manning walked into the church. A couple of minutes later, Jenks’s radar detector started to peep. He looked at the screen, moving it back and forth slowly. First reading was south. He got the line, put his eye to the scope, and looked at the building. The box was on the third floor, balcony on the right, sliding door cracked open, vertical blinds almost closed. Shooter.
“West negative thirty-three,” Jenks muttered into his comm unit. He swung the detector back north, repeated the process. Window box. Slight shadow two windows over. Shooter number two. “West sixty-one.”
“You sure?” Ferguson asked. “Doesn’t make sense.”
“West sixty-one,” Jenks repeated.
Chen popped up in their earpieces.
“Where the hell is Lynch?” she said.
Lynch sat in the back pew of the church, watching the door. Manning came in. He got up, walked toward her, but she took a hard left into the first confessional. Lynch moved to stand between the confessional and the door to the church. He’d have to catch her on the way out.
Lynch waited, that weird feeling where you lose concept of time. Over the comm unit he heard Jenks give the radar locations. West sixty-on? What the hell? That was Manning’s place.
Then Manning stepped out of the confessional.
Captain Starshak sat in the back of one of the SWAT vans lined up two blocks west, still not believing that all the shit Lynch had told him over the past ten hours was actually going down. Lynch had gone over maps with Starshak, explained the location codes, given him the comm frequencies that Ferguson would be using. Starshak had briefed the leads in all the other units. Now they were listening in, waiting for Ferguson to name the locations, ready to roll. Only thing Lynch hadn’t said was where Ferguson and this Jenks guy would be. Said he didn’t know. Starshak had let that go. Knew the line Lynch was walking. Hell, if he were in Lynch’s shoes, he’d be walking it himself. Things worked out right, it wouldn’t matter. Things worked out wrong, well, it wouldn’t much matter then, either.