Penance: A Chicago Thriller Read Online Free PDF

of him, like a bone that had been set wrong being made straight. All those frantic couplings all those years ago, with Katie in the car before they married, and even after, there had always been a savagery to their mating. The cop groupies he’d pick up on Rush Street and the cruel gravity of their need. Now this gentility, this fluidity. He was swimming, and not struggling toward the surface and choking for air. Just swimming. For the first time in his life, he could breathe here.

 
    CHAPTER 3 – RESTON, VIRGINIA
     
    “Yes, sir, we will keep you apprised.” Tecumseh Weaver (Colonel, USMC, retired) hung up on Clarke, sat back in his chair at InterGov Research Services and sighed. Fucking Clarke. How a guy got to be where he was with balls as small as he had was still a mystery to Weaver. But he sure had his panties in a bunch now. This little problem of his, it wasn’t the sort of thing Clarke could sic an official dog on, though. So he was tugging on Weaver’s leash instead.
    Weaver’d never liked being on a leash.
    The suite housing the offices of InterGov Research Services was not quite in Langley and not quite in DC, which was as it should be. And if the company’s internet connections and telecommunications were a little more secure, their staff a little better armed, and their raison d’etre a little harder to discern than those of the neighbors in the generic office park just off of I-66, that was as it should be, too.
    InterGov Research Services was a limited liability corporation whose owners were even more mysterious than the company itself, being the figments of some very creative imaginations. InterGov was one of the thousands of small consultancies surrounding Washington that cleared away some of the fiscal bloat of the federal budget every year. InterGov’s masters viewed this not as wasteful, but rather as a way of creating financial breathing room outside the prissy auspices of the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees. Just another form of off-balance-sheet accounting.
    And InterGov did provide real and valuable services to its legitimate clients. It had access to the NSA’s supercomputers and to some of the CIA’s best research talent, so clients like the Department of Agriculture received quick, accurate, and affordable analyses of pressing issues like Uzbekistan’s projected wheat yield, trends in Kenyan coffee production, and the statistical likelihood that, somewhere in the United States, the curious little bug that caused mad cow disease was already turning some citizen’s brain into so much insentient Jell-O.
    But InterGov’s most valuable talent pool knew very little about computers, except for those attached to weapons systems. And if most of them were a little larger, a little stronger, and a little more familiar with places like Yemen, Mogadishu, Medellin, or Montenegro than your average Joe, well, that was as it should be, too.
    It was the highest and best use of the latter pool of talent that Weaver considered as he waited for Chen to get back in from Reagan National.
    Fucking Fisher, thought Weaver. This Chicago thing had his stink all over it. No details yet – Weaver had the techies hacking into the Chicago Police systems and would have those shortly – but there was speculation regarding a rifle.
    Ishmael Leviticus Fisher, InterGov’s resident sniper – hell, resident genuine USDA-inspected number-one badass – he’d gone off the reservation two months earlier, and InterGov was pretty far off the reservation to begin with. Fisher had been on Weaver’s operations team ever since he put InterGov together. Hell, Fisher and Weaver went back all the way to Saigon. Anyway, InterGov had a leak. A lot of your Al-Qaeda types, the ones that hadn’t got Hellfire missiles up the ass, Fisher’d been the man who put them down, so he had a little rep in Arab circles. Just before Christmas, one of the raghead groups who were looking to put Fisher’s head on a wall got