At least Corsco didn’t want cute. No air bubble in the IV line, no smothering with a pillow. That made things simpler. Quick hit and run. Probably the .32 with the heavy suppressor. Made the pistol bulky, but it would be bagged up in the special rig, catch the brass and everything. No problem there. Get in the room, shut the door, five rounds center mass. You’d have to be right outside the door to hear it, and you’d have had to have heard a light pistol with a heavy suppressor before to know what it was. Target was medically fragile already; one round close to anything vital should be enough. Pride in the work, though. All five rounds would be right on target. Two rounds for the cop if that was necessary, enough to make sure he went down for the duration. Didn’t need him dead. Better if he wasn’t. That left five rounds in the clip just in case.
Northwestern was wired up, all the camera locations on the blueprints. So what? Cameras everywhere these days. Still, you study the placements then you know which side of the hall to walk on to give them a bad angle. Put the high lifts in a pair of loafers, those would add a few inches. The gray wig probably. People weren’t suspicious of old people. Those silicon cheek inserts with bite wings, add weight to the face, mess with the telemetry if anyone was running any facial recognition stuff, wear the fat vest under the shirt, look forty pounds heavier. A hat. Pick up a Cubs hat somewhere, seemed like the right look for plugging a loser like Fenn.
Get a sweater, something easy to slip on over the rest of the get up, something easy to take off, a cardigan, something like that. Something bright, a solid color, say yellow. It was spring, yellow was a spring color. Give anybody that catches the action something easy to remember. The way it worked with witnesses, you give them one, big flashy detail, they seize on that. So if anybody pulls their shit together quick enough to call security, they’d tell them look to look for the yellow sweater. Security’d ask the usual stuff – height, weight and such, and the witness would be all “I dunno, it happened so fast. But a yellow sweater. I remember that.” Dump the cardigan in the stairwell, and boom, you’re invisible.
From the blueprints, three possible exit strategies. Closest stairs were to the right, but that meant walking right past the nurses’ station. Guy’s in a coma in ICU, so they’d have him wired up to monitors. Things would start beeping as soon as the target got plugged, nurses would be moving. Take the other stairs to the left, at the end of the hall. Pass the elevator on the way. If the door happens to open just then, cool. Hop on, ride it up or down, didn’t matter. Long shot on the elevator though, so the real plan was the left stairs. Target was on the seventh floor, no cameras in the stairwells. Dump the cardigan and the wig in the stairwell. Pop out of the stairs on five, got a bathroom two doors down. Grab a stall, shed the shirt, the fat vest, the pants, yank the lifts out of the shoes, spit out the bite wings. Wear scrubs under everything. Less than a minute, then step out of the bathroom and bingo, you’re just another employee heading home on shift change. Pictures on the website showed the housekeeping staff in dark blue scrubs, so get some of those. Google up the uniform store closest to Northwestern, they’d have everything in stock.
Shift change was at 8am, so do it then. Not tomorrow, next day. That was still inside Corsco’s forty-eight hour window. Already working way too much off third-party intel. Needed to at least do a walk through, eyeball the set up, get a clear mental image. So recon tomorrow morning, do the job the next day.
Plane would be at Chicago Executive, up in Wheeling. Traffic was going to suck, that was the downside to the shift-change timing, but the upside was worth it. Pilot was getting paid well to be on call. Buzz him fifteen minutes out, have the engines turning over. Worse case, be wheels up two hours after pulling the trigger.
Ran through the plan one more time, tightening it up. Really liked the fat vest considering there was going to be at least one cop involved. Had a Kevlar lining in the fat vest. Too bad about the cop, though. Shoot a cop, that draws heat, even if you didn’t have to kill him. But heat was why people called the Eagle. Heat was why they paid the money. Wouldn’t be the Eagle’s first cop.
CHAPTER 70
The next morning, Lynch and Bernstein walked into Starshak’s office, closed the door.
“We gotta talk,” said Lynch. “Been thinking. Been so busy chasing our tails on this thing we haven’t done enough of that.”
“What?” asked Starshak.
“It’s al Din,” Lynch said. “The Feds bring him up during their little dog and pony show, tell us he’s Mr .22.Then they give us the one crappy picture, say that’s all they’ve got. All I gotta do is flash it at the shelter where Saturday got killed and I get more than that, find out it’s in Algiers anyway on account of the woman there knows the church. So you gonna tell me that Langley doesn’t know where that is? They can’t even give us that?”
“You saying they don’t want us to find him?”
“I’m saying they’re playing us. They’re playing everybody. Fine. We’ve been around that block before. Whatever above-our-pay-grade national security voodoo they’re up to, we aren’t going to get looped in. But this fuck al Din, he’s in our town killing people. Killed a couple of kids now. That shit we don’t have to eat.”
“So what do we do about it?” Starshak asked.
“I took it down to our tech guy, asked him to start running it against whatever they have from the various crime scenes we can tie al Din to. Guy laughs at me, tells me with that kind of resolution, the bad angle, the lighting, he’d be pulling up false matches by the boatload. Says I got to narrow it down. So I ask him to at least run it against the Stein hit. The stadium has plenty of cameras and we have timing on that down to a tight window. Tech guy pulls up this.”
Lynch handed Starshak an 8x10, nice clear shot of a slim, well-dressed, olive-skinned man in the Stadium foyer.
Starshak looked at the picture from the Feds, then at the new one. “So that’s al Din,” he said.
“Gotta be,” said Lynch.
“OK, so have them run that against the other scenes.”
“Which is what Lynch said.” Bernstein chiming in. “They’re already on it. But that might be a problem.”
“Problem how?”
“The picture,” Lynch said. “The tech guy, before he could even run what the Feds gave us against the Stein shooting, he had to clean up the image quite a bit. Enough, he says, that, if we tried to take it to court, it might get tossed. Get a defense with a good budget, they could bring some digital image expert in and claim we doctored the original enough to get a match.”
“And,” Starshak said, “if the original gets tossed, then anything we found using it gets tossed. Fruit of the poisoned tree.”
“Right,” Bernstein said.
“What else?” Starshak asked. “You said questions.”
Lynch set the grainy surveillance shot that Hickman had passed out down next to the clean shot they’d pulled from the stadium camera.
“We already know that Corsco, Hernandez, and al Din have access to our surveillance system,” Lynch said. “So we know the system isn’t secure. You seriously think that Hickman and those suits from DC don’t have a way in?”
Starshak sat back, the look on his face telling Lynch he could see where this was going.
“Meaning they could have pulled all the clean shots of al Din that they wanted right off of our own system, probably already knew for certain he did Stein, yet they hand us this crap picture to work with, junk that might queer a case if we ever manage to bring one.”
“Yeah,” Lynch said. “That.”
Starshak sat back, mouth tight, then sat forward again.
“Your witness from the stadium, the waitress chick, she hasn’t seen these pictures yet, right? Either of them?”
“No,” Lynch said.
“OK, we got a physical description of al Din, right? And we got the piece of junk picture from Hickman. So go back to the techies, give them that, have them run a new search, no doctoring, give ’em a time spread maybe five minutes each side of the good picture, and hope that this pic pops up in the pile. Then we show the whole pile to your waitress chick and hope she picks out al Din. Then we’re legit.”
“It’s still dodgy,” Bernstein said. “It would be a problem if anybody hears how we got the clean picture the first time.”
Starshak took the good picture; put it in his desk drawer. “What picture?”
“Ah,” said Bernstein.
“So let’s hope your waitress is good with faces, Lynch. Then we put a BOLO out on al Din. Hickman said not to chase Hardin and Wilson. Fine. He didn’t say anything about this fuck.”
“You didn’t ask,” said Lynch.
“Not gonna, either. Anything else?”
“Fenn,” Bernstein said. “Got a call from Northwestern. He’s starting to show some brain activity.Doc thinks he may come out of it in the next day or two.”
“How many cylinders is he going to be running on if he does?” asked Starshak.
“No way to know,” said Bernstein.
“They still keeping it quiet?” Lynch asked.
Bernstein nodded. “Yeah. Still handing out the daily update to the celebrity press. No change, no reason to expect any change. But you gotta figure it will leak eventually – nurse, orderly, somebody.”
“OK,” said Starshak. “I’ll make sure our security at the hospital’s still good. For now, we keep it under wraps.”
“And if it leaks, we watch and see what Corsco does,” said Lynch.
CHAPTER 71
“At least that sad little bear is gone,” Wilson said.
She and Hardin were at the Phillips Park Zoo on the east side of Aurora, small municipal zoo, but a decent sized park, and had an eighteen-hole golf course. A park Hardin knew pretty well from his childhood, knew the topography at least, had an idea on the sightlines, egress points. Type of place a sharp operator might want to set up a meeting if he had to have a meeting with guys who just maybe wanted to kill him.
“God,” Hardin said. “I forgot about the bear.”
When he was a kid he used to walk down to the park a lot. One of the few places on the East Side where you’d see a lot of West Siders, kids wearing new clothes, not hand-me-downs, place where you could imagine some other kind of life.
They used to have a bear at the zoo, not a very big bear. Brown bear, Hardin guessed. He was no expert on bears. Fake stone grotto with metal bars in the front and a cement floor that was always puddled with urine and bear shit. Floor of the cage was maybe as big as a decent-sized living room and that bear had been locked inside since the day it arrived. Thing never seemed to move, just lay on the cement, dead eyes staring straight ahead, while kids tossed rocks and sticks at it through the bars trying to get it to do something. Bear had been there the first time Hardin could remember coming to the park, he figured he was four or five. It had still been there two decades later when he left for Africa.
“I hated coming here,” Wilson said. “That bear, it broke my heart.”
Some things had changed. The golf course had a makeover, new clubhouse. Nice little visitors’ center at the zoo, educational stuff for the kids. Big new water park on the south end, on Montgomery Road, place that used to be a big, empty field, place where Hardin and Esteban and some of the other guys from the neighborhood could get up a sandlot game while the little leaguers from the good neighborhoods played real ball on the real diamonds a little to the east. Mastodon Lake was still there, place where some WPA guys had found mastodon bones back in the Thirties when they fixed up the park on the Feds’ dime.
And cameras. Of course cameras. Security cam on the visitors’ center, another at the parking lot, more probably.
Hardin stood next to a white Camry in the parking lot, turned to face the camera, took off the broad-brimmed hat he’d been wearing everywhere and wiped his brow, did a slow turn, checked all the roads in and out.
He hoped that was enough.
“You sure this is the best idea?” Wilson said. “Our hometown? Seems like the kind of place they’ll be watching.”
“Fouche gets us a deal, we’ll have to make the handoff someplace. Maybe I want a home field advantage.”
“And maybe not.” Wilson said, smiling.
“Maybe not,” said Hardin.
They walked out of the park and down Ashland to the parking lot in front of the taco stand where they’d left the Honda. No cameras there. Not the kind of place that could afford them. But the food was good.
CHAPTER 72
Munroe sat up in bed, reached for his phone. He lifted his head from the desk, felt the knot behind his right ear. That little bastard al Din. Munroe’s head was going to be sore for a while. The cell buzzed again. He picked it up, looked at the screen. The surveillance guys.
“Yeah,” he said.
“We picked up a hit on Hardin,” said the voice on the other end.
“Where?”
“In Aurora. Got it quick because we have a priority feed running on any cams out there. Him and Wilson. They were poking around a big park on the east side, Phillips Park.”
“Get it in time to angle anybody in?”
“No. Even with those cams at the top of the pile, there’s still like a ninety-minute processing lag.”
“What was he doing?”
“Recon’s my guess, unless you think he had a sudden urge to go to the zoo.”
“Hold on a sec,” Munroe said. He opened his laptop, brought the park up on Google Earth. Big place. Got a few ways in and out, more than a few if you’re on foot. Trees, some hills it looked like, plenty of stuff to screw with sightlines, but he’d need boots on the ground to get the topography. Public as hell.
And Hardin would know the park. Wilson would know it. The park and everything around it. Might know some people, too.
One more thing caught his eye. A building on the west edge of the park. Munroe switched to street view. Ten stories maybe? Apartments, it looked like.