He had his chat with Hardin and Wilson. They already had their money and Munroe couldn’t get it back. He’d tried. OK, win some, lose some. They’d gotten what they wanted out of the deal – they got to kill Hernandez. They pretty much knew the rest of the story and were ready to play ball, just so long as Munroe understood that, if he ever came after them, or if they even thought that he was trying, they’d go all Snowden on his ass. They had the whole story spooled up online somewhere ready to pop up in unfriendly inboxes. We’ll see about that, Munroe figured. People get careless after a while. So friends for now. In a year or two, Munroe’s story would go from being news to being history. Once it was history, anything Hardin might say wouldn’t be a competing story in the media cycle; it would be revisionist nut-job conspiracy babble. Munroe would revisit his feelings toward Hardin and Wilson then.
Munroe’s phone pinged. The Chicago PD crew was on its way up. The last bit to lock in place.
Starshak, Lynch and Bernstein got off the elevator, some suit with an ID badge ushering them to the end of the hall and into a big conference room on the right overlooking the Calder statue in the plaza below, Lynch gimping along stiff-legged. The suit stood in the corner like a chaperone, hands clasped in front of him.
Hardin and Wilson sat at the table, backs to the windows, Hardin finishing the last couple bites of a sandwich. Nothing on Wilson’s plate but crumbs. Mess of food on the credenza against the wall to the left: big basket of kaiser rolls, cold cuts, pasta salad, fruit, platter of cookies and brownies.
Wilson looked up. She had a bandage on the left side of her face, near the hairline. “You guys here to get your minds right?”
“That seems to be the plan,” Lynch said. “Food any good?”
She shrugged. “Better than no food. I’ve been hungry for lunch all day. It was looking like I wasn’t going to get any.”
“I know what you mean,” Lynch said. “If I’d known breakfast was going to be my last meal, I would have paid more attention.”
Hardin swallowed the last bite of his sandwich. His left arm was in a sling
“You OK?” Lynch asked.
“No damage to the joint, just the meat. I’ll be fine. You?”
“Just stitches. Thanks again, by the way.”
Hardin shrugged. “Hey, thanks for not shooting us on sight. I’ve got a feeling that was the plan with pretty much everybody else.”
“Couldn’t have shot you if I wanted to,” Lynch said. “My trigger finger was tired by that point.”
The door across the hall opened, Munroe stepping out. Lynch just got a glimpse into the room before the door closed – pictures and street maps wallpapered everywhere, mess of guys in shirtsleeves and ties milling around, mess of laptops on the table.
Munroe crossed the hall, stepped into the big conference room.
“You guys get enough to eat?” he said to Hardin and Wilson.
“Sure,” Hardin said.
“Yeah,” she added. “Stunned by your largesse.”
Munroe smiled, turned to the suit in the corner. “Nobody was talking out of school in here, where they?”
“Just small talk,” the guy answered.
“OK, take Hardin and Wilson upstairs. I’m gonna have a word with these guys.
The suit paused a second, opened his mouth once, then closed it, then opened it again.
“Sir, Hickman asked that an agent witness all interviews.”
Munroe chuckled. “You’re taping all the interviews, right?”
“Yes sir.”
“Seems kind of redundant then, doesn’t it?”
“Yes sir, but I have orders from Hickman.”
Munroe’s smile went away. He stepped up close to the agent. “You piss off Hickman, what’s the worst that can happen to you?”
“I could lose my job sir.”
“You piss me off, what’s the worst that could happen to you?”
The man didn’t answer for a moment.
“I’ll take Hardin and Wilson upstairs, sir.”
The suit left the room, led Hardin and Wilson down the hall toward the elevators.
“You guys hungry?” Munroe asked, his smile back. “Help yourselves. Want something we don’t have, I can get it.”
“Beluga caviar, maybe a bottle of Moët Chandon,” Bernstein said.
Munroe laughed. “Fucking Jews. Always busting my hump. I hear you were asking about Pardo a little ways back. You want some pastrami, I’ll send for it. You want Beluga and champagne; I’ll call Chuckles the Suit back and have him shoot you.”
Hickman came storming into the room.
“Damn it, Munroe, you agreed I could have an agent at all interviews. We need to do things buy the book now.”
“Now?” said Starshak. “Gee, that would imply that maybe some rules got broken earlier. Hard to imagine.”
Hickman reddened a little.
“Yeah,” Munroe said. “Tell the nice police officer what you mean by ‘now’.”
“I mean by the book now and always,” Hickman said.
Munroe smiled again. “And when we get to the interview, we’ll call the agent back. Right now, we’re just a few old warhorses shooting the shit over lunch. Anybody with a battle scar is welcome to stay. That leaves you out, counselor.”
Hickman’s face got even redder.
“Don’t feel bad about the scar thing,” said Bernstein. “I just got mine this morning.”
Munroe closed in on Hickman, his smile disappearing again.
“Hickman, why don’t you go take a leak or something, so you don’t hear anything you’ll have to deny at a confirmation hearing someday.” Hickman stood his ground for a second, then walked out of the room. Munroe closed the door.
“Shut it off Morty, all of it,” Munroe said.
“OK,” came a voice from the ceiling. “You’re clean.”
Munroe got up, walked to the coffee pot over on the credenza, poured a cup. Walked back to the table, sat down. “I’m going to play it straight with you three, see how that works out. What I tell you, there’s no record of it, not anywhere, so you start shooting your mouth off, it’s your word against mine, and I don’t exist. So basically you’ll be talking to yourselves about what the voices in your head told you.” Munroe took a sip of the coffee, set the cup down. “Shit got out of hand. But the bottom line is this. We were flipping al Din. Hadn’t wrapped the deal yet, but we were close. He gave us the scoop on Iran running a fake Al Qaeda op here in Chicago. Seems, Khamenei and the mullahs over in Tehran were worried that, with us pulling out of Afghanistan, that was going to free up our resources to start paying more attention to them and their nuclear ambitions. So they were planning 9/11 the sequel. Plan was to pin that on Al Qaeda, keep us chasing ghosts around Waziristan for another decade or so. So that’s one thing.
“The other was this. The deal the Iranians were planning, al Din would have been the guy pulling the trigger on it. Guess he watched the Bin Laden take down, realized we hold a grudge about this kind of thing. Did the math, figured out, best case, he’d spend the rest of his life hiding in some dump somewhere waiting for Uncle Sam to zero a drone in on him. That’s where the Iranians miscalculated. Turns out al Din isn’t very ideological, just wants his payday and a nice place to enjoy his sunset years.”
“So you were making a deal with him? Guy we’ve got lined up on at least nine homicides, he was going to spend his time on some beach on the taxpayers’ dime?” Starshak said.
Munroe shrugged. “You say homicides, he says targets. I say collateral damage. It sucks, no way to unsuck it. But yeah. The deal was he gets paid off, we get to wring out his brain, and we get what we need to call Tehran on its bullshit.”
“Those homicides?” Starshak said. “How is it some guy who doesn’t exist gets to make a deal that has to come out of the Cook County DA’s office?”
Munroe shook his head. “You never charged him, you never even had him in custody, and now he’s dead, so that all pretty much falls into the spilt milk category. Where we still got a problem is we got a parking garage full of bodies to explain, OK? And I’m sorry a couple of you guys got nicked up, but it looks like you’re both gonna be fine. But here’s the thing, we had al Din on one side of this deal and Hardin on the other. Hardin got stuck in town with a shitload of hot rocks after Stein got whacked, he needed a buyer, and he was talking to us. Then this business with him and Hernandez cropped up and that presented a whole new opportunity. Gave me some terrorist diamonds and Hernandez in the same place at the same time, everything I need to sell a whole new war on terror story and put a real dent in the mess down in Mexico.”