Dan O'Shea - Penance

Weaver nodded. “OK. Tomorrow, you place the teams.”

Uri left the room to talk with the troops. Weaver worked on his other problem, where to keep Cunningham on game day, where to park the van. That would be his command post. Looked at the map. One of the buildings Uri had circled was Manning’s place. Less than a block to the church, private parking in the back that let out into the alley, so out of public view, a straight shot up or down Sheridan to most of the spots they’d ID’d as possible hides for Fisher. A thousand yards might be a long shot, but it wasn’t much of a drive.

Manning’s place was perfect.

Lynch pushed out the door of the Walgreens and headed back to the house. Had enough small arms to overthrow a banana republic, but they were out of toothpaste. Needed to think anyway, so he walked up to the drugstore on Cicero. Halfway back across the parking lot, a fit looking guy in his sixties, buzzed gray head, walked up next to him.

“You Lynch?”

Lynch didn’t say anything, just nudged his jacket open, switched the bag to his left hand, got ready.

The older guy gave him a little smile, held his hands away from his body. “Little nervous, huh? Don’t blame you. I’m a friend of Cunningham’s, from the old days. We need to talk. So how about I give you a lift back to your mom’s place?”

“How do you know about my mom’s place?”

The older guy shrugged. “Had to find you, it’s public record, no real stretch.”

Lynch looked at the guy for a minute, liked the vibe he got, but pulled out his 9mm anyway. “OK. You drive. You don’t mind if I just hold on to this, do you?”

“Suit yourself.”

Lynch followed the guy to the far end of the parking lot. The guy got into a tan Corolla, Virginia plates. Lynch jumped in.

“Sorry for the cloak and dagger shit, jumping you in the parking lot like that,” the guy said. “Brian Jenks, late of the USMC, currently an advisor to various folks on sniper and counter-sniper ops. I was Cunningham’s CO for twelve years.”

Lynch shifted in his seat, got his back to the passenger door so he could hold the gun on Jenks from across his body.

“You’re the guy who told him about the Dragon?”

“Fisher? Yeah, few days ago. Then yesterday, I get these Fed types all over me, all over a mess of guys. Questions about Cunningham. Any Muslim sympathies, something about him being Nation of Islam, even hinting at some Al-Qaeda crap. Guy’s a Baptist. Always has been. But they are tarring his ass with a big brush, and that pissed me off.”

“It’d piss me off, too,” Lynch said. “Not enough to drive half way across the country, though.”

“It wasn’t just the Cunningham shit. I’ve been working with some propeller-heads for damn near a year on some new counter-sniper tech. Real advanced shit. Combines audio and radar input to exactly — and I mean to the inch — pinpoint the source of gunfire. I’ve got two prototypes ready to ship out to Afghanistan for testing. We get these tweaked and in production, we’re gonna save a lot of Marines. Army pukes, too, I guess. Then I get the call from Cunningham. I start hearing noises in the shooter community, somebody way up the food chain snatching up every trigger jockey he can get his mitts on. Then these Feds start nosing around. And now my prototypes get hijacked by some three-letter types — CIA, NSA, who the fuck knows. National security is all the explanation I get. I figure those units are headed here.”

“And you’ve come to babysit them?”

“I’ve come to see what the hell is going on. This ain’t the way this sort of thing is done. It’s gotten way too high-profile.” Jenks turned, looked at Lynch. “You’ve heard of black ops?”

“Been getting an education the last few days.”

“This Fisher guy, from what I hear, he was with a group that’s so black it would make the inside of your asshole look well-lit. These guys just do not like attention. Now they got FBI guys working on their frame job, they got three-letter pukes putting their heads up to hijack hardware. The game just ain’t played that way. Somebody is both real fucking desperate and real fucking powerful.”

Lynch decided that, if the guy wanted to kill him, he could have just popped him in the parking lot instead of saying hello. That, and what he’d said so far matched up with what Lynch had heard from Cunningham. And it wasn’t a bad time to make a new friend. Lynch put his gun away.

“The powerful part?” Lynch asked. “Let me run a name past you, you tell me if it fits. Hastings Clarke.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah, OK, Jesus has more clout, but Clarke is up there.”

“He’s in this?”

Lynch nodded. “Long story, but this all goes back to a local clusterfuck in 1971. It’s how Clarke got his start, got his Senate seat.”

Jenks was quiet for a while, then “You still in this? What I hear on the news, they’ve handed the whole deal to the Feds, lotta noise about how maybe they can’t trust Chicago PD on this thing.”

“I’m not on the books, but I’m still in it.”

“You got any assets?”

Lynch thinking for a moment, then deciding what the fuck, his neck couldn’t be out any further.

“Couple people that used to work with this Fisher. They’ve been on this for a while now, trying to take Fisher out on the QT. You happen to hear about a big firefight downstate, a week or so back?”

“Anybody gets popped with a long gun, I take an interest. I saw that, I thought it smelled funny.”

“That was Fisher setting up his old team to buy himself some breathing room. Head of that group is this guy Weaver.”

“Tech Weaver? I know him. Nasty son of a bitch.”

“One of his guys, Ferguson, was on-site for the shootout. Didn’t like the way it played out. He ratted out Weaver who, I guess, was getting a little far outside the lines even for this sort of thing. Weaver got canned, and this Ferguson got put in charge. Ferguson’s walking back to his hotel here two days ago, and four Israelis tried to punch his ticket.”

“Sounds like Weaver got his job back.”

“And I bet I know from whom.”

“So you’re with this Ferguson?”

“Yeah, him and some chick named Chen.”

“Little Chinese sociopath?”

“That’s her. You know her too?”

“Scares the shit out of me. OK, here’s how I can help. Bag in the back, it’s got a radar detector in it. We’re working on this radar thing, and I figure if we’ve got one, then somebody we don’t like is going to have one someday. So I do a little tinkering on my own, completely off the books at this point, and gin this puppy up. They get my units in place and turn them on, this is gonna tell you where they’re at. Also, got one of the old audio-only Boomerang units. Won’t give us the detail the new ones do, but when somebody starts shooting, it will get us close, ten meters or so, depending. And it’s passive — no radar, so there’s no way to track it.”

“That’s helpful.”

Back at the house, Lynch made the introductions. Now Lynch, Ferguson, Chen, and Jenks sat around the dining room table looking at the same map Weaver’s team had been looking at, coming to most of the same conclusions. Decided the best place to be was on top of the taller building directly across from the church. Gave them a shot at any place Weaver’s people might set up on the west side of Sheridan.

“We’re going to be out-gunned,” said Ferguson. “Once the shit starts flying we got zero time for confusion. So here is how we designate locations. Church is zero. South is negative, north is positive. First building south is negative one, second is negative two, etcetera. Floor, if you have it, is the second digit. East side of Sheridan starts with E, west side with W. So if you see something three doors north on the second floor on the west side, it’s west postive thirty-two, if it’s south, then west negative thirty-two. Got it?”