That wasn’t a problem Munroe could fight, not right now. The War on Drugs? What a crock. Anybody who wasn’t looking at the drug problem through a political lens knew the answer. Legalize every goddamn thing the cartels wanted to sell. Drug prices would plummet, the cartels’ revenue would dry up. Sure, they could try to go legit, but they wouldn’t be having gun fights with each other anymore, they’d be having marketing fights with the cigarette people, the booze people, the Coca-Cola people for all Munroe knew. And there’d be a whole new stream of sin tax revenue to put a dent in the deficit. But the tobacco-sucking, booze-swilling American electorate was convinced that Jesus didn’t like drugs, besides cigarettes and booze.
So the War on Drugs was what Munroe had. Problem being, you don’t fight a war with policemen and warrants and jail terms. You fight a war with planes and tanks and Marines. You don’t send the enemy to jail, you send him to hell. But you couldn’t invade a sovereign nation that was supposedly fighting the same enemy you were just because they sucked at doing the job. Not yet anyway.
Not unless you could invent a reason.
With al Din in play and with Stein dead, Munroe could already make a case that Iran had killed a US citizen on US soil. With this Hardin in the middle of it and with what Munroe knew about how Hernandez held a grudge, Munroe could suck Hernandez into the game as well. Then he could paint the lot of them with the same stink; put the cartels in bed with the terrorists. With the money-laundering angle, Munroe could make the case they were solving each other’s problems. That would be the new narrative.
Then the cartels wouldn’t be drug dealers anymore, they’d be enemy combatants. Then we could lean on Mexico maybe, get them to invite us over the border to help clean house. It wouldn’t take that long. These cartel guys, they aren’t dug in underground like Al Qaeda – Al Qaeda had been born in hiding, it was in their DNA. You had to root them out one at a time like fucking cockroaches. But the cartel bigwigs? They liked their villas. They liked the high life. They weren’t running around free because the Federales didn’t know where to find them. They were running around free because they had the cops, the army, the legislature and the judiciary on their payroll, or enough of them anyway.
Give Munroe a long weekend, a green light, a few dozen drones, and some Navy SEALs and he could decapitate every cartel from the Rio Grande to the Panama Canal. Sure, something would grow back in its place, but Munroe would make damn sure it was our something this time. If you weren’t going to legalize the drug trade, then the best way to protect the nation was to run it.
Munroe was getting ahead of himself, he knew that. Early in the game, still too many loose ends, too many unknowns, and he’d need some buy-in from way above his pay grade. But it was time to start whispering in a few ears.
CHAPTER 24
The next morning, Lynch and Bernstein were watching the show the surveillance guys had pieced together on Hardin on Lynch’s computer. Hardin gets off the plane. Hardin takes the bus to the car rental center. Hardin rents a white Ford Fusion.
They got the plate on that, called the Hertz people. Hardin had used an ID that said he was Nigel Fox. Ran that, Nigel Fox had been at the Hyatt down on Wacker until yesterday. Turned out he was a British newsie Hardin ran with back in Africa. Guy had kicked the bucket a few months back. Ran the plate numbers on the Fusion through the system. Hardin had it parked at the Grant Park garage from maybe forty minutes after Stein got hit until yesterday morning. Then he dropped the car back at the airport, took the L back into town, then jumped a BNSF commuter train to the western burbs. That’s where they lost him. No cameras on the trains, and the train he caught was a local: twenty-five stops between Chicago and Aurora.
“He had to drive back from our South Shore crime scene to the garage, right?” said Lynch. “Just before he took his rental back to the airport? But according to the tape, that rental hasn’t moved since he parked it. So let’s rewind on that, see if we can find the other car.”
They got back on the phone with IT. The entrances to the Grant Park garage were all near Hurley’s Millennium Park, the mayor’s zillion-dollar-over-budget vanity fiasco. It was like some garish
nouveau riche
attempt to one-up Central Park in ten percent of the space. There was the bandstand that was supposed to be another of Chicago’s architectural marvels but looked pretty much like a beer can that had been blown open with a firecracker. There was the Great Lawn, the one the security guys were always chasing the actual Chicagoans off of because they had to keep the grass nice for when the paying customers from the North Shore came down for the concerts. There was the Bean, a giant, stainless steel kidney bean parked right in the middle. It was supposed to be called Cloud Gate. Lynch remembered the artist getting his knickers in a knot when even the media started calling it the Bean. Lynch wondered what it was about Chicago sometimes – some sense of civic inferiority or something – that made the city break out the checkbook for any artist looking for a payday. You had the Picasso, God knows what that was supposed to be, a winged baboon or something. Across from that, next to the county building, there was what looked like a cement amputee with a fork in her head. You had the red spider down by the Federal Building. Had some white carbuncle in front of the State of Illinois building, looked like a giant wadded-up tissue. What was that thing called again? Monument with Standing Beast? Thing always smelled like urine because it had all these crannies homeless guys and drunks could get into when they had to take a leak. Even had a giant metal baseball bat in the West Loop.
One thing about Millennium Park though, it being Hurley’s baby. It was wired for cameras, wall to wall.
It only took a few minutes. The IT guy pulled up a shot of Hardin ducking into one of the stairwells off Randolph, tracked him back through the park, got him parking a black Grand Marquis on Columbus, behind the Art Institute. They ran that for a while, saw the tickets stacking up and then one of the blue city wreckers hauling it off.
“Looks like the right ride,” said Lynch. He and Bernstein were at the auto pound on lower Randolph, gloves on, taking a first look at the car. The Marquis had some blood on the inside of the right rear door, some on the seat next to it. Also, there was a bullet hole through the front passenger seat. Looked like the round hit the radio.
“Got a shell casing stuck in the seat cushion there,” Bernstein said, pointing.
“So if the gun ever turns up, we can match it. Match the blood to Skinny from down on South Shore, and we got this Hardin guy roped in to that solid.” Lynch popped open the glove compartment, took out a sheet of paper and unfolded it. It was a picture of Hardin at the car rental place at O’Hare – the same picture the tech guys had dug up for Lynch and Bernstein when they’d started running him down. On the bottom, in block printing, was: WHITE FUSION GL4 655 GRANT PARK GARAGE NORTH END.
Lynch held the paper out to Bernstein.
“This shit with Hardin and the mob, that went down yesterday early, right?” Lynch said.
Bernstein nodded.
“So who was pulling up surveillance shots before we even knew who we were looking for?”
“Good question,” Bernstein said.
“And what were a couple of goombahs doing with Hardin’s license number and location before we even had it?”
“Could see where that might kinda eat at you,” said Bernstein.
The pound attendant came back down from the office. Lynch had sent him in to run the VIN.
“Got reported stolen up at Old Orchard three days back,” the attendant told them. “Retired couple up in Glenview. Plates are off a junker, scrapped better than a year ago.”
Lynch pulled out his cell and called McCord. “Hey,” Lynch said. “We found your car from South Shore, or at least one of them. You’re gonna have to get some techs over to the pound and process it.”
“Got something for you too,” said McCord. “That pen? Got a hit on the prints. Michael Xavier Griffin. He’s in the DoD database. Marines, 1986 through 1994.Nothing in CID, so he’s been a good boy, far as we know.”
“Sure, except he used to be Michael Griffin and now he’s Nick Hardin. You know a lot of good boys who change their names?”
“Don’t know too many good boys who know how to kill somebody with a pen either,” said McCord.
CHAPTER 25
Hernandez watched out the window of the Gulfstream as it made its descent into DuPage Airport, coming in from the southwest, over the east side of Aurora. From the air, he picked out the parking lot where his brother had died. Where his brother had been killed. The brother he had never avenged.
Sandoval, he was dead. Hernandez had been with the crew that grabbed him, had watched while they used the blowtorch on him, had used the torch himself. He’d cut Sandoval’s throat himself, holding Sandoval’s head up, starring into the one eye he hadn’t burnt out, making sure the
cabron
’s last vision in this world was Hernandez’s face. He’d learned all there was to learn from Sandoval.
All these years. His brother in the ground all these years, and Griffin alive and breathing somewhere. Hernandez had never stopped looking. Or so he told himself. But was it true?
You forget, just a little, he had to admit that to himself. His power grew. His wealth grew. The complexities of running the business grew. Whole states in Mexico where he was the power as much as the government, more than the government. Distribution networks – into Mexico, into the US. The gangs in the major cities all over America, managing those relationships, trying to keep over-armed teenagers focused on moving his product instead of on their silly imaginary wars with the gang up the street that looked sideways at their girls.
Had he done all he could? Who could know? He had contacts looking all over the world. Every night, before he slept, his last thought was of his brother. And it was in that moment, the night before, that this Lee had called. Griffin’s fingerprints. In Chicago. He’d read through the email package from Lee. The Hardin identity, the murder scene, Corsco’s people involved. Hernandez would talk to Corsco.
The wheels hit the tarmac. Lee would be waiting. Hernandez’s Chicago contacts would be waiting. Soon, very soon, he would be Griffin’s last vision of this world. And by that time, Griffin would be glad to see this world go.
CHAPTER 26
“Is Hernandez on the ground?” Agent Jeanette Wilson asked from the back of the room at the emergency DEA briefing at the Chicago field office.
“Don’t know yet,” said Brad Jablonski, head of Chicago’s DEA field office. “Still sorting through what’s coming in from the CIs. We do know this – he’s got his whole organization on a war footing, and it’s all about finding this Griffin. You guys want to fill us in there?”
Lynch and Bernstein were seated up front. Lynch took the podium.
“We got a hit on a set of fingerprints at a murder down in Area 2 – the South Shore thing down at the old US Steel site, the business with the Corsco soldiers. You’ve all heard about that. Anyway, the fingerprints match those of a Michael Xavier Griffin in the DoD database.” Lynch hit the button to advance the slide show on the screen, a split-screen shot with Griffin’s official Marine photo on one side and screen grab from one of the city cam shots on Columbus on the other. “Griffin was in the Marines from ’86 to ’94, his last six years as a scout/sniper in Force Recon. So he does qualify as a genuine bad ass. You guys already know the story on Hernandez’s kid brother. This Griffin was home on leave, out for dinner with some other guy…” Lynch turned to Bernstein.
“Esteban Sandoval,” said Bernstein.
“Sandoval, right,” Lynch said. “Anyway, Griffin gets in a beef with Tiny Hernandez, that’s Jamie Hernandez’s kid brother. Thing ended up with Tiny and two of his goons DOA – and it was Griffin who killed all three of them.” He hit the advance button again: Sandoval’s driver’s license picture from ’93, and then a crime scene shot from the basement of the crack house on the west side where they’d found his body in March of ’95.”Cops say Sandoval had nothing to do with it, other than he happened to be out with Griffin the night it happened, but I guess that was enough for Hernandez. This is what Hernandez did to Sandoval.” In the back of the room, Jeanette Wilson turned away for just a beat. Surprised Lynch a little. He knew Wilson’s rep. She wasn’t anybody’s idea of a shrinking violet.
“Here’s what else we know,” Lynch continued. “Griffin has been living for almost ten years as Nick Hardin. French national. Been in West Africa pretty much that whole time, some kind of glorified gofer for TV news guys. Between ’94 and the TV gig, we got nothing. Rumor is maybe the Foreign Legion. Which would explain his having a clean French ID. Evidence indicates he was here to see Abraham Stein – got a witness that puts him in Stein’s box the night of his murder. Hardin may have been trying to sell some diamonds, but we don’t have everything on that yet.”
“You like Hardin for the Stein hit?” One of the DEA suits about halfway back.
Lynch shook his head. “Possible, but we don’t think so. Our witness saw Stein alive after Hardin left. Could’ve snuck back in, but it doesn’t feel like it. So we don’t think it was Hardin, Griffin, whoever–”
Jablonski butted in. “Let’s just say Hardin, keep the confusion down.”
Lynch nodded. “So, Hardin. With Stein, it could be diamonds. Don’t know what’s behind the business with Corsco. But whoever shot Stein also killed Beans Garbanzo down at the South Shore site after Hardin had left the scene – left in a different car than the shooter was driving. So again, could it be Hardin, some kind of three-rail shot with multiple vehicles? Could be, but I’d give that about a five percent chance right now. We do know this. Our shooter, Mr .22, whoever he is, he took out an African refugee named Membe Saturday a couple blocks west of the Stadium the same night he shot Stein. So it looks like we got a second party involved here, a shooter with an agenda around Hardin. That’s all we know so far. You guys have any tie in on the narcotics side that might clear any of this up?”