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small envelope from her pocket. The envelope held two tiny electronic devices: a camera half the size of a pencil eraser and a transmitter smaller than that, two thin wires sticking out of it like antennae. “These are our most advanced audio and video surveillance options. I found the audio transmitter wedged into the molding inside one of the confessional booths in the church the victim had just left. The camera was affixed to the bottom of the last row of pews. The camera was directed at the door of the booth in which the transmitter was hidden.”
    “You check with Paravola?” Tom Paravola headed InterGov’s technical section.
    “Thirty sets of these units are missing.”
    “So we can assume another set is sitting in the church in Chicago just waiting to get us in this up to our asses. Locals tumble on those, nobody’s going to think they came from Radio Shack.”
    “Yes, sir. Their discovery would prove problematic.”
    Weaver thought for a moment. “Get to Chicago, Chen, but I don’t want you anywhere near that church. Let’s get a local on this. Who’s that guy we used on the University of Chicago break-in down there? Villanueva? See if we can get to him. This goes south, I don’t want our fingerprints on it.”
    “Yes, sir. I will make arrangements. Is there anything else?”
    “Bring Ferguson up to speed, will you? Tell him to get a team together by tomorrow, get the war wagon loaded up. We need to get Fisher inside a body bag before some cop gets his mitts on him. If Fisher decides to start answering questions, well, that would add up to better than thirty years of the wrong sorts of answers.”
    “Yes, sir.”
     
    Weaver sat alone in the office, nursing a drink. Hide and seek with Ishmael Fisher, Ferguson was gonna love this one.
    Weaver closed the files on his desk and put them in the drawer. Lease renewal two months out, request from research for another $150,000 in computer shit, open enrollment for the health plan coming up. Couldn’t think with all that crap in front of him. Needed to get a line on Fisher.
    OK, Fisher was driving almost certainly. Just too hard to hide traveling by air now. Also – ten days between Wisconsin and Chicago, so he was taking his time. If he had slipped his moorings, and Weaver was pretty sure Fisher was well away from the dock at this point, there wasn’t anything wrong with his navigation. Everything aboard the SS Fisher was battened down and squared away. Just working off a new set of charts was all. Charts from Mars or somewhere.
    Get PsyOps back on it, of course. See if the behavioral witch doctors could get a reading. They were right more often than Weaver expected them to be, but he still didn’t trust that psychic hotline bullshit.
    Two killings, though. So that gave him two dots to string together. Enough to start looking for a pattern. Weaver punched up the two churches on the computer, plotted them on GPS. Dot two was damn near exactly due south of dot one – within yards of due south of dot one. OK, that’s odd. Could be a one-in-360-degree coincidence, but at least it was a place to start. Something about Fisher’s moral rigidity and an exact north-south line resonated with Weaver. He sent an email down to research.
    Needed to muddy up the waters, too. Dot one was working out. Locals didn’t have squat, and they weren’t going to find the slug or the electronics now.
    He had Eddie Marslovak attached to dot two. Guy with that kind of money, those kinds of connections… Weaver figured they could play the six degrees of Kevin Bacon game with him pretty easy. Wouldn’t be too hard to put some stink on him, to get the cops interested. It’d fall apart, but Weaver didn’t need a conviction, he just needed time.
    Weaver’s to-do list was getting crowded. Get research to expand their parameters on the Fisher search. See what they could do about grabbing any public video – ATM cameras, security cameras, toll booth cameras, traffic cameras.