Bahram Lafitpour stirred his coffee. He, Hickman and Munroe were back at Lafitpour’s condo. They’d waited at Lafitpour’s office until 10pm, raid assets in place, just in case Hardin showed. He didn’t.
“So we have to assume that Hardin knows I betrayed him,” said Lafitpour.
Munroe nodded. “You worried he’s going to make a run at you?”
Lafitpour shook his head. “People have been making runs at me for thirty years. My security is excellent. Besides, Hardin isn’t an ideologue. He’s just trying to sell the diamonds. There is no margin in making a move on me. The question becomes whether we still have a play with him.”
“So we took a shot,” Munroe said. “He’s a big boy. He knows all about Plan Bs. And he still needs a buyer. Get word back to his contact that we’ll still play ball. Probably gonna cost us though.”
“We can’t make a deal with Hardin,” said Hickman. “We don’t just need the diamonds, we need him. We’ve promised his scalp to the Feds and the DEA, and I’ve already got the press rubbing the bottle on this. We don’t get a genie to pop out of it soon, they’re going to get pissed and start asking the wrong kind of questions.”
“Yeah,” said Munroe. “And with the Feds inside the tent, we started the clock on this thing. We got a couple of days at the outside.” Looking at Hickman now. “This Wilson, she was with Hardin?”
“Yeah,” Hickman said.
“And she was at your briefing?”
“Yeah,” Hickman said.
“So she knows about al Din,” said Munroe.
“Yeah.”
“What do we know about her?” asked Lafitpour.
“Jablonski’s pulling apart her file. Should have word soon.”
Silence around the table for a moment, tension tightening.
“So,” said Lafitpour, “we need still need Hardin and the diamonds.”
“Don’t need him alive,” said Munroe.
Hickman and Lafitpour looked at him. Munroe wasn’t worried about Lafitpour, but this thing was getting sloppy and taking too long. Dead or alive, he needed it done, and dead was always faster and usually easier. Quiet around the table for a minute, Munroe watching Hickman’s face. They weren’t just talking about a little legal three-card Monte anymore, playing fast and loose with the facts to frame some bad guys. Now, killing people was on the table.
Finally, Hickman shrugged. “OK. But we still need to throw the Feds a bone. If they don’t get to make a bust on Hardin, they’re going to want something else.”
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.”