Long pause. Lynch could see a vein popping on the side of Starshak’s neck.
“This fate worse than 9/11, you wanna fill me on that?” Starshak said.
Munroe shrugged. “Biological attack. Our guys projected between thirty and a hundred thousand dead, depending.”
“That’s been taken care of?”
Munroe was coming as close to leveling with these guys as he did with anybody. For one thing, he liked them. Damn good cops. Smart, tenacious, big brass ones, and Lynch did take out al Din before the little fuck could pop the cork on his toys. Second, these guys had real good bullshit filters. He knew their type. If they thought he was feeding them a pile of crap, they’d start picking at it, trying to find something that made sense. No, the right play was to give them as much of the truth as he could, hope they saw the reasons for it, show them they were boxed in on all sides, and hope they could live with it. Hell, they were cops; they were used to living with shit. Warrants tossed because of bureaucratic slip ups, psychos walking because some shrink sold a jury a sob story, civil liberty types tying their hands any way they could. At least this time all the bad guys ended up dead. They even got to kill one of them. The worst one of them. No threats, not with these guys. A guy like Lynch? Threaten him and he’d never stop coming after you. Threaten him and you had to put him down. Munroe didn’t want that. He liked the guy. Put him down if he had to, of course, he’d put all three of them down if he had to. Just wouldn’t threaten them first. That would be a waste of time.
So he fed them all the truth he could, but he sure as hell wasn’t telling them there were still five devices hidden around town. They didn’t need to know how close this had come to going south.
“Yeah. That’s been taken care of,” Munroe said.
Everyone sat there, nobody talked.
Starshak’s cell rang. He answered, listened for a while, hung up. “The chief,” he said to Lynch and Bernstein. “Nobody’s got our back on this. And nothing we do is going to change any of it. Our orders are to play ball.”
Lynch choked down his anger, trying to keep his mind clear. He’d never been Don Quixote, never imagined the world could be perfect. Do the best you can with what you got, that was his compass. This sucked. But he’d always known shit went on outside the lines. Sometimes it was bad shit done for good reasons. Lynch couldn’t stop this, he couldn’t change it. All he could do was try to get some good out of it. Serve and protect, that was the deal. Not the entire free world, just his city. Lynch wanted something for Chicago.
“If I play ball, I want something,” Lynch said.
“What?” Munroe asked.
“I want Corsco.”
Munroe’s smile was back, broad and expansive. “Tell me what you need.”
“Hardin,” Lynch said. “I need to borrow Hardin.”
“Done,” said Munroe. The big man pulled a small digital recorder out of his pocket and tossed it to Lynch. “And I’ll throw this in for free.”
Lynch hit the play button. A little tinny without earbuds, but he could make it out. Munroe jacking up Ringwald and Corsco, Corsco confessing to putting a hit out on Hardin.
“Won’t do you much good in court,” said Munroe, “what with me not existing and all, and I did kinda point a gun at him. Well, shot a gun at him. But if you need it for window dressing, knock yourself out.”
CHAPTER 98
Munroe took his cell out of his pocket. It had been vibrating all through his chat with his Chicago PD buddies, but he didn’t want to take the call, break the rhythm.
He checked the number. The lab. He hit redial.
“What?” he asked.
“We got a problem. The device, it started ticking.”
“What do you mean ticking?”
“It’s got a secondary program. A failsafe. It’s set up to detonate remotely off a cell signal. Looks like al Din had this thing set up so he had to call the cell’s number every day to reset the timer. If he didn’t, then the device starts counting down. Al Din didn’t call today. This sucker is ticking.”
“And you can’t shut it off?”
“No so far.”
“How long?”
“You got till 1730 hours.”
Munroe looked at his watch. Almost 3.00. He had until 5.30. No time, and he didn’t have the manpower on the ground to run any kind of search off the books. He had two plays. Option one, call Starshak back, get Chicago PD on this, give them everything they’d worked out about al Din’s timeline and hope to hell they found these things before they went off. Option two; just let the clock run out. Have to ice the two guys out at Argonne, wouldn’t do to have it get out Uncle Sam had known tens of thousands of Americans were going to die and just sat on his hands. Once he’d heard about the bio angle, Munroe had made some preparations on the QT, had a shit load of Cipro in a National Guard armory up near O’Hare, had a mess of other shit either in town or teed up and ready to wing in on his say so – isolation units, HAZMAT suits, body bags. Had rough outlines for a couple different quarantine scenarios he could ram down the National Guard’s throat if it came to that. Of course, the Guard would only be running things until they could get regular Army in here. And he knew what was in the weapons, the medical confusion they were meant to cause. Be able to get word out so everybody knew exactly what they were dealing with. That meant they’d keep the body count down to the very low end of the projections. Problem being the low end was still around ten thousand – three times as many as 9/11.
Upside would be this. The coverage you’d get. Every talking head in the world doing stand-ups in front of the bodies stacking up in temporary morgues, some ghost town shots of the Loop, CDC guys wandering around in spacesuits, hospitals with beds lining the halls. Couple days of that, Munroe could probably get the President to sign off on nuking Tehran. And the Mexican problem? Tea Party ass hats would have to give up on their border fence. That thing would have to come down so we could get the armor over the border.
He walked over to the window, looked down at the plaza where they had the Calder sculpture. Thing looked like a giant red spider. Town sure did like its funny statues. Lots of people walking back and forth, a mom chasing a couple little ones around the legs of the sculpture, one of the kids giving out a happy squeal loud enough he could just hear it through the glass.