Greed: A Detective John Lynch Thriller (6 page)

Bobby had been part of the team that helped set up the Chicago video surveillance system – one of the most sophisticated in the world. Thousands of cameras – on light poles, on buses, private security cameras networked in. It was on the news now and then, but he figured most Chicagoans just didn’t get it, didn’t understand that a lot of them were on camera every time they stepped outside. Or inside, for that matter, if they were anyplace public. Bobby understood it – hell, that’s why he’d moved out to Naperville. That Big Brother eyes-in-the-sky shit gave him the willies.

But Bobby knew an opportunity when he saw one, and he just might be the best freaking systems guy in the world. The Chicago surveillance gig had been his last as a wage slave. He’d built a shitload of back doors into the code, and those gave him run of the system. That’s when he’d gone private. He’d figured there’d be people who’d pay top dollar for access. He’d figured right. And then the City had come calling. Bobby’s dad had been a black GI in the waning days of ’Nam. His mom had been a Saigon mattress girl with enough sense to understand that the only good thing likely to come out of the war was a ticket to the States. So Bobby had come squalling into the world in the VA hospital in Chicago, and he’d grown up to understand the racial algebra in the City. Fuck that “Cablinasian” shit Tiger got away with. You got any black in you, then you’re black. And that means you’re a minority. And that means minority contracts. So when the Chicago PD needed vendors for maintenance and upgrades for their ever-growing video system, Bobby tossed his hat in the ring. With his experience in the system already, he came out with the big prize. Money was decent, workload was minimal, and it kept him wired in to the max. It also meant he could cover his tracks. After a big job, the type that might get people thinking, he’d close up whatever wormhole he hacked in through, bury his tracks under a pile of code, and set up a shiny new way in somewhere else.

Damn, this blonde was hot. He checked his database – couldn’t remember whether he’d hacked anything at Deloitte yet. Yep. Took a bit, but he found the file for employee IDs, ran his JPEG of the blonde against the images they had for their security cards, and up she popped. Courtney Schilst, senior in the tax practice. Fifteen minutes after she’d walked in the door he had her name, salary, cell number, her IP address and where she lived – an apartment just east of 59, a shade north of Fox Valley. Ten minutes after that, he was into her Facebook and Twitter feeds, scrolling through, looking for a hook. Courtney didn’t know it yet, but inside a week, two at the outside, she’d be another notch on Bobby’s belt. Boy had to have a hobby, right?

A warning ping from one of his monitors. Search he was running for Tony Corsco. That Nick Hardin guy, some reporter or something who’d flown in from Africa in the last couple days that Tony wanted run down. A little bit of trouble – the guy had to have at least two sets of ID because none of the hotels or car rental places had popped up a Hardin, but the airlines had. So Lee had his arrival time and the photo from Corsco. That was all he needed. He tracked Hardin from the gate to the Hertz lot, got the license plate on the rental. Some holes in the system between the airport and downtown, but Lee had fed the plate number into his system and set up an auto search. Cameras all over the city had been bouncing all the license plates they picked up off the number, and now he had a hit. The car was in the Grant Park garage, toward the north end, so this Hardin guy, he could be at a few places down that way. Got the Swissotel, got the Fairmont, got the Hyatt maybe. Fuck that shit. He’d give Corsco the car and the location, and if Corsco came back looking for more, then Bobby’d put him back on the clock.

Bobby Lee didn’t do charity work.

 

CHAPTER 8

 

At least he was in Saigon, thought Munroe. That was the good news. Or Ho Chi Minh City, whatever the locals were calling it these days.

Munroe took a pull on his drink, looked out the window into the wee small hours of the Asian morning. He liked Saigon. The whole Vietnam thing was supposed to be this big black mark, America’s lost war, but for a young kid just learning his way around the sharp end of things, there wasn’t a better place to be, not back in the late-Sixties. The food, the Eurasian girls, the French panache, road trips to the bush to pick up a few VC scalps, back to the Caravelle by dark for drinks with the journalists and the guys from all the other embassies who were supposed to be aid officers or attachés, but who were all doing the same bad shit Munroe was doing under cover of whatever flag flew over their compounds. Happiest days of his life.

Thrill pretty much wore off by 1975 when he rode the second-to-last chopper off the roof of the embassy, but by then he had enough scalps on his lodge pole, VC and otherwise, to write his own ticket. Which worked out great, because it was right around then that the Church Committee went public with how the Agency had been very naughty and hogtied Langley with a mess of Marquess of Queensberry rules. Hogtied them just about the same time that the Cold War balance of terror started breaking down into a multilateral, asymmetrical clusterfuck where any yahoo with a little scratch in his pocket could stick it up Uncle Sam’s ass with anything from a WMD to an airliner full of Koran thumpers.

Just when playing outside the lines got more necessary, it got more complicated. Munroe’d gone one way, a lone wolf Langley could sic on problems that required his brand of discretion.

Sometimes, though, the masters needed a blunt instrument. For that, they had Tech Weaver. He’d taken his group private, set up InterGov.

Munroe and Weaver had both still been on Uncle’s payroll, of course, but they were off the grid, untraceable line items bouncing around the federal budget with only one mandate – make sure the bad guys understood that Uncle Sam still had teeth.

Weaver’d been ex-military though. Problem with those guys, they got that chain of command thing in their blood; always need an org chart. When you screwed the pooch, org charts left a place for people to start digging. Weaver’d screwed the pooch big time in Chicago a year or so back. Screwed the pooch so bad, the president ended up putting a bullet through his own head. People started digging.

Now Weaver was dead and InterGov was history – well in that form, anyway. Which meant Munroe was busy.

Another sip at his drink. Better than four decades since his salad days, but Munroe still liked the Caravelle. Conversation at the bar was a little different – it was all thirty-something entrepreneurs talking labor costs and transfer pricing. Little smile at that. Anybody still saying America lost the war? The whole point of the exercise was to keep Vietnam out of the Commie column. You wanted to find a Commie around here anymore, you had to chopper up to the I Drang valley and start digging for bones. Get a couple Vietnamese talking nowadays, and they made your average Iowa Rotary Club member sound like Leon Trotsky. These guys took to capitalism the way their fathers took to black pajamas and AK-47s.

Other than hardly anybody spoke French anymore, Saigon was pretty much the same. Still liked the food, and if you knew how much to slip to which concierge, you could still get hot-and-cold running Eurasian girls sent up to the room with all the fixings.

So Munroe was in Saigon. That was the good news.

The bad news was he’d only sent the girls home about two hours ago, it was three in the morning and his phone was ringing. He looked at the screen. Station chief out of from Lagos. That meant the chatter they’d picked up out of Freetown about a mess of diamonds going missing had checked out. Diamonds with an unsavory pedigree – Al Qaeda by way of Hezbollah. And that meant his Saigon sojourn was over. Munroe hit the talk button.

“This diamond bullshit’s not a fire drill?” Munroe asked.

“No. The situation is fluid and some of the information is conflicting, but the best estimate is at least fifteen ounces.”

Munroe paused a moment. Fifteen ounces meant at least nine figures retail. That meant the ragheads were up to something big.

“We sure it’s not Mossad?”

“They’re pissed. Had to talk them down. They thought it was our operation.”

Be a lot easier if it was Mossad, thought Munroe.

“I assume you have heard about Stein?” the man on the phone asked.

“Yeah.”

“There is something off a video feed from Chicago you should see. I am sending it to your phone.”

Munroe’s phone dinged and he opened the message. Screen capture of an olive-skinned guy in a topcoat.

“Al Din,” Munroe said. “He did Stein?”

“Looks that way.”

“But the noise on your end is that the diamonds are still in the air?”

“Yes. And al Din is still in Chicago.”

Munroe thought on that a second. Al Din was freelance, so theoretically he could tie to anybody, but for the last few years at least he’d been running almost exclusively out of Tehran.

Islam might be one big happy bowl of ragheads to your average Tea Party dipshit, but Munroe knew better. Iran was Shi’a, and with Iraq castrated, Iran was looking to consolidate its position as the top dog through the whole Shi’a crescent – Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Lebanon, some real pull in Pakistan. Now you had Hezbollah throwing in with Assad in Syria, and it was hard to pick a dog in that fight. Sure, you had the sane people in the Syrian opposition, secular types you could do business with. But you also had a pile of fundamentalists of the Sunni stripe, and it was starting to look like the yahoos had the numbers. Which meant Syria could well go from the dictator column to the Sunni whacko column – that was the side of the balance sheet that Al Qaeda called home. Munroe was more comfortable with a dictator personally, except now Assad owed his ass to Hezbollah, and that meant he owed his ass to Tehran. Whatever piece of it he hadn’t already whored out to Putin.

So, the diamonds. Lebanese immigrants in Sierra Leone had pretty much run the West African diamond trade since the first deposits were discovered back in the Thirties. These were old school Lebanese guys who, on the Palestinian question, were a lot friendlier with Amal than Hezbollah. But Hezbollah was pretty much the only game in Lebanon these days. When you’re holding a gun to some guy’s family’s heads, muscling in on the diamond trade gets pretty simple. Which would seem to put the West African diamond pipeline in the Shi’a column.

Still, even among the true believers, sometimes money trumps all. When Al Qaeda started looking for ways to move money around after 9/11, after the West slammed the door on all their bank accounts, Hezbollah was happy to play ball. Diamonds became one of Al Qaeda’s favorite financing mechanisms, even if it meant that some Sunnis and some Shi’as had to make nice.

Whether you were Sunni or Shi’a, though, you could still hate the Jews, and when you got to the commercial end of the diamond market, the part in Antwerp and New York, the Jews still ran the market. So Israel was wired into it pretty good. Munroe knew Stein had been working with Mossad to fuck up Al Qaeda’s diamond play, sucking their runners into false buys, whacking them and taking the stones.

So al Din? Could be he was on Al Qaeda’s dime this time, whacking Stein, trying to clear Mossad out of their pipeline. Except al Din was still hanging around Chicago. Not a smart play unless the man had another reason to stay in town. Munroe had played footsie with al Din before, couple of times, and he knew one thing for sure. Al Din had a reason. The guy didn’t do stupid.

And that meant the Stein murder was the opening gambit on a bigger play, one that had something to do with better than $100 million in stones on the move. That was a butt-ton of operating capital. Hell, the ragheads had pulled off 9/11 for box tops and bottle caps by comparison. Something was up. Something big. And there were too many teams on the field.

“OK,” Munroe said to the Lagos station chief. “Three things. First, wake up the Google jockeys at Langley and have them start running scenarios – what kind of mischief could our Islamic friends get up to with nine figures to play with? Could be Al Qaeda boys, could be Tehran. So big-ticket items – loose nukes, whatever. Get ears up in all the weapons markets. Find out who’s flush all of a sudden and we’ll have a chat with them. Second, whoever has the diamonds has to move them, and these stones aren’t papered up. That’s gonna take an inside player somewhere, and that means Johannesburg, Antwerp, Mumbai, Tel Aviv, New York, maybe the Russians – there has to be money on the move, and a lot of it. Let’s find it. Third, Stein was Chicago, al Din’s in Chicago, so I’ll be in Chicago soonest. Get me an asset roster. Anybody we got in the Windy City, on or off the books. And anybody we can lean on. I know that Mayor Hurley and his thugs have that place wired up – I want real time access to every camera and microphone in town before I hit the ground. And let’s see if we can find out who has the goddamn diamonds, shall we?”

“I’m on it,” the man said.

Munroe killed the connection, went to the window, opened it, leaned on the sill and looked out over the city. Three in the fucking morning, but plenty of traffic. New York thinks it doesn’t sleep? Nobody’s stealing a march on these little yellow bastards. Warm breeze, always that scent of
nước mắm
on the air. An elegiac feeling he had too often these days. Munroe never knew when it was going to be his last time someplace anymore. If this was it for Saigon, he hated to say goodbye.

 

CHAPTER 9

 

Liz Johnson sat across the table from Lynch in the booth at McGinty’s. Over her shoulder, he could see her on TV above the bar. Not unusual – he saw more of her on TV these days than he did in person.

“You’re on the tube,” he said. Her and one of the talking heads at CNN. Sound was down, he couldn’t tell what they were talking about, but then Hastings Clarke’s picture popped up, the former President of the United States who resigned his office by eating a gun after Lynch had dug up his past. He and Johnson had just been starting out then; she’d gotten the story from the inside. Her book on the whole mess was coming out in a couple of weeks. She was A-list talent now. She’d gone from a local reporter at the
Trib
to one of the faces every cable news outlet wanted in their stable. Spent as much time in New York and Washington as she did in Chicago these days.